One Canoe, Five Accounts
Every narrator on May 7th, 1805 records the same precipitating event: a hard east wind that rose late morning and swamped one of the small canoes around 11 A.M. or noon. The accounts diverge in where they place blame and how much they say about it. Lewis is explicit about cause, attributing the near-loss to the bad management of the steersman
— a phrasing Clark echoes almost verbatim with one Canoe by bad Stearing filled with water
. Ordway and Whitehouse, both enlisted men, decline to assign fault: Ordway writes simply that the canoe filled with water, but we got it Safe to Shore
, and Whitehouse follows with nearly identical phrasing. Gass, brief as ever, notes only that one of our canoes turned over
and that the accident happened near the shore.
The Whitehouse-from-Ordway pattern is conspicuous here. Their entries share not just substance but sentence order: the early start, the east wind, the swamping at noon, the halt, the beaver caught overnight and the five shot at the stopping place, the 4 o’clock resumption, the buffalo gangs on both banks, and Clark’s two buffalo at the evening camp. Whitehouse adds one independent observation — rough hills & ridges & bottoms on the S. S.
— and a small editorial note that the buffalo meat proved good meat to Eat.
Otherwise his entry reads as a near-copy of Ordway’s.
What Each Narrator Alone Preserves
Lewis’s entry is the longest and the most discursive. He alone records that the drift wood begins to come down in consequence of the river’s rising
and registers mild surprise that the water clears rather than muddies on the rise. He alone develops the day’s most sustained landscape passage, describing the north-bank plain as rising gradually then becoming level as a bowling green
and extending as far as the eye can reach.
And he alone pursues a small ornithological puzzle: bald eagles are abundant, but he has seen neither the blue crested fisher nor a fishing hawk
since the Missouri’s mouth, and he reasons from the river’s turbidity that no exclusively fish-eating bird could subsist along it. The eagles, he infers, must scavenge carcasses. It is a characteristic Lewis move — observation, absence, hypothesis — and nothing comparable appears in the other four entries.
Clark alone supplies the quantitative spine: the river rose an inch and a half overnight, and he obtained a meridian altitude yielding latitude 47°36’11”. His tally of the day’s kill — 8 beaver, 3 buffalow & an Elk
— matches Lewis’s count exactly, suggesting the captains compared notes before writing. Clark also records that he walked the bank and shot two of those beaver himself, a detail Lewis omits.
Gass is the outlier on distance. He gives the day’s run as sixteen miles; Ordway and Whitehouse both report 15½. The captains give no figure. Gass also bleeds straight into the May 8th entry in the excerpt provided, previewing the Milk River — the only narrator on this date to name what is coming.
The Lean Elk and the Saved Buffalo
A small detail unique to Lewis sharpens the day’s economic logic. He killed an elk in the morning that thought it fat, but on examineation found it so lean that we took the tongue marrowbones and Skin only.
The two buffalo Clark killed near the evening camp, by contrast, were in good order
and fully dressed. Ordway and Whitehouse register the buffalo butchering at camp; neither mentions the discarded elk. The aggregate kill counts the captains report — eight beaver, three buffalo, one elk — therefore overstate what actually entered the larder. Only by reading Lewis against the others does the day’s true yield resolve: two buffalo carcasses saved whole, an elk reduced to scraps, and beaver whose value lay as much in pelts as in meat.
The five entries together recover an afternoon that any single one would render thinly. Lewis supplies the reasoning, Clark the measurements, Gass the mileage, and Ordway and Whitehouse the rhythm of the enlisted day — the early start, the wind, the wait, the resumption, the camp.
