The expedition’s arrival at the mouth of what they would later name the Marias River represents one of the more consequential geographic encounters of the journey westward. Yet on the evening of June 2, 1805, none of the four journal-keepers present knew they had reached a fork that would stall the Corps for over a week. The day’s entries by Meriwether Lewis, William Clark, Patrick Gass, and Joseph Whitehouse reveal how a shared experience produces strikingly different texts depending on rank, literacy, and narrative habit.
Hunting, Weather, and the Arithmetic of Game
All four narrators record the day’s hunting tally, but with revealing variation. Lewis offers the fullest accounting and the only motive: he walked ashore deliberately to procure elk hides for the iron-frame boat he intended to assemble.
I thought it best now to loose no time or suffer an opportunity to escape in providing the necessary quantity of Elk’s skins to cover my leather boat which I now expect I shall be obliged to use shortly. Accordingly I walked on shore most of the day with some of the hunters for that purpose and killed 6 Elk 2 buffale 2 Mule deer and a bear.
Clark’s entry, characteristically, mirrors Lewis’s tally almost exactly—”6 Elk & a Bear and 2 mule deer, and 2 buffalow”—a near-verbatim correspondence consistent with the captains’ habit of consulting one another’s notes. Clark adds the beaver but omits Lewis’s stated purpose, treating the hunt as event rather than strategy.
Whitehouse, writing from the perspective of an enlisted man on the river rather than ashore with the hunting party, reconstructs the day in time-stamped fragments: “about 9 oC. Some of the hunters killed a buffalow and an Elk… about 12 oC. killed another Elk… towards evening the hunters killed a yallow bear.” His final tally—”the hunters killed 6 Elk in all to day”—matches the captains, suggesting information traveled to him by evening report. Gass, by contrast, mentions only “a brown bear,” compressing the day’s hunting into a single notable kill.
The Bear and the Missing Drama
The most striking divergence concerns the bear encounter. Lewis devotes nearly a third of his entry to it:
the bear was very near catching Drewyer; it also pursued Charbono who fired his gun in the air as he ran but fortunately eluded the vigilence of the bear by secreting himself very securely in the bushes untill Drewyer finally killed it by a shot in the head; the shot indeed that will conquer the farocity of those tremendious anamals.
Clark notes only “a Bear”; Gass calls it “a brown bear”; Whitehouse, interestingly, identifies it as “a yallow bear”—a color term the enlisted men sometimes used for the grizzly. None of the three records the near-mauling of George Drouillard and Toussaint Charbonneau. This is one of those moments where Lewis’s privileged position—on shore, with the hunting party—gives him exclusive access to incidents the river-bound journalists could not witness and apparently did not hear retold in detail.
Arriving at the Forks
By evening all four narrators register the camp’s location at a river junction, but with different degrees of perplexity. Gass records simply “the mouth of a large river.” Lewis writes that they camped “opposite to the entrance of a very considerable river” and notes the deferral: “it being too late to examine these rivers minutely to night we determined to remain here untill the morning.” Clark echoes this with “the Currents & Sizes of them we Could not examine this evening.”
Whitehouse alone states the underlying problem in plain terms:
we Came 18 miles & Camped at a fork of the river. we could not determine which was the Missourie.
This single sentence from the enlisted man’s journal articulates the navigational dilemma more directly than either captain. Lewis and Clark, perhaps reluctant to commit uncertainty to paper, frame the matter as a postponed examination rather than a confusion. Whitehouse, with no command responsibility for the decision, simply names the difficulty.
The register differences are equally telling. Lewis writes in extended, subordinated sentences with reflective asides (“I think we are now completely above the black hills”). Clark’s prose is functional and clipped. Gass produces a clean, publishable summary—he was preparing his journal with eventual print in mind. Whitehouse’s chronological style, with its repeated “about” time markers and its mention of a distant mountain to the west, preserves the texture of a day on the towline that the captains’ summaries elide.
