A Short Day on the Water
Five narrators record May 13, 1805, and four of them describe essentially the same modest day: high wind in the morning, hunters dispatched, a 1 P.M. embarkation, roughly nine miles made, camp in a bottom. Gass is the most compressed, logging only that the party “embarked; passed three creeks, one on the North side and two on the South; went seven miles and encamped in a large bottom.” His mileage diverges from the others — Ordway, Whitehouse, and Clark all settle on nine — a small reminder that even the basic ledger of distance was not standardized across journals.
Ordway and Whitehouse track each other closely, as is their established pattern. Both note the wind abating, both record the hunters’ kills of elk and deer, and both mention that one hunter “wounded a brown bear” (Whitehouse adds the qualifier “white or brown bear,” preserving the party’s still-unsettled vocabulary for the grizzly). Whitehouse alone observes the topography in detail:
passed hills on each Side which make near the River only the bottoms on the points & in the bends.
It is one of the rare instances where Whitehouse’s geography is more textured than Ordway’s, suggesting he was not copying mechanically.
Lewis Names the Hunter; Clark Names the Cook
Lewis supplies the detail the enlisted journals omit: the wounded bear was Gibson’s. He also offers a forward-looking note that the others lack — that he is now reserving elk skins “for making the leather boat at the falls,” a small administrative aside that anchors the day inside the larger logistical arc of the expedition. Lewis also reads the river itself as a forecast: “the courant reather stronger than usual and the water continues to become reather clearer, from both which I anticipate a change of Country shortly.”
Clark’s opening paragraph parallels Lewis closely — same nine miles, same scant timber, same Gibson incident, same two deer (“one a mule deer & the other a common Deer”). Lewis credits Clark with the same two kills (“Capt C. who was on shore the greater part of the day killed a mule and a Common deer”), confirming the captains were comparing notes.
The Misplaced Bear Fight
Then Clark’s entry does something peculiar. After closing what appears to be the day’s record, the text continues into a long, vivid narrative — Clark walking on shore to kill a buffalo calf because he “felt an inclination to eat some veal,” and then six hunters stalking a grizzly that, once shot through both lungs, charges them, pursues them to a twenty-foot riverbank, and drives two men to leap into the Missouri before being killed by a final shot to the head.
so enraged was this anamal that he plunged into the river only a few feet behind the second man he had compelled take refuge in the water, when one of those who still remained on shore shot him through the head and finally killed him
This passage is one of the most famous grizzly encounters in the journals — and it is conventionally dated May 14, written by Lewis. Its appearance here, in Clark’s May 13 entry, with the narrative voice slipping mid-paragraph from “I killed two deer this evening” to “Capt Clark walked on shore,” reflects the well-known editorial entanglement of the captains’ journals: Clark frequently transcribed or absorbed Lewis’s prose, and dating boundaries in the manuscripts are porous. The third-person reference to “Capt Clark” inside Clark’s own entry is the giveaway.
What the Comparison Reveals
The enlisted men’s journals (Gass, Ordway, Whitehouse) treat May 13 as an ordinary short day with one wounded bear left in the brush at sundown. Lewis treats it as a logistical hinge — elk skins set aside, river clarity noted, hunter named. Clark’s entry, taken whole, conflates two days and two voices into a single document. Read across all five narrators, the day is small; read inside Clark’s notebook alone, it is enormous. The discrepancy is itself the lesson: the expedition’s record is not a single chronicle but a layered, sometimes self-borrowing archive in which the boundary between days, and between captains, occasionally dissolves.
