July 12, 1805 finds the Corps of Discovery split between two camps along the Great Falls portage in present-day Montana. Captain Lewis waits at the lower camp for canoes delayed by high winds; Captain Clark works at the upper camp hollowing out cottonwood for the boats that will carry the expedition over the divide. Sergeant Patrick Gass moves between them. The three surviving entries for this date describe a single coordinated day of labor, but each narrator filters it through a distinct sensibility, and reading them together reveals how the expedition’s documentary record was assembled from overlapping but unequal vantages.
Same Day, Three Registers
The factual core is shared across all three accounts: Sergeant Pryor’s shoulder, dislocated the previous day, still pains him; Private Bratton is dispatched (or arrives) for axes; hunters bring in three deer and two otters; mosquitoes and gnats torment the men; wind delays the canoes. Yet the prose registers diverge sharply.
Lewis writes as a commanding officer narrating his own impatience:
I feel excessively anxious to be moving on. the canoes were detained by the wind untill 2 P.M. when they set out and arrived at this place so late that I thought it best to detain them untill morning.
Clark, by contrast, opens with weather and labor in compressed, telegraphic phrases:
a fair windey morning wind from the S. W. all hands at work at Day light Some at the Canoes, & others drying meat for our voyage-
Where Lewis introspects, Clark inventories. And Gass, writing for an eventual reading public (his journal would be the first published, in 1807), supplies the kind of concrete measurement neither captain bothered to record:
we passed a small bottom on the north side of the river, in which there is an old Indian lodge 216 feet in circumference.
Neither Lewis nor Clark mentions this lodge at all. Gass’s eye for built structures — a carpenter’s eye, fittingly — repeatedly catches details the captains pass over.
Who Copies Whom
The Lewis and Clark entries show the familiar pattern of mutual borrowing without identical copying. Both captains record Pryor’s injury, Bratton’s axe errand, the three deer and two otters, the wind, and the insects. But Lewis’s version is consistently fuller and more discursive. Clark notes simply that hunters “returnd in the evening with three Deer & 2 orters.” Lewis takes the same fact and expands outward into natural history:
the otter are now plenty since the water has become sufficiently clear for them to take fish. the blue crested fisher, or as they are sometimes called the Kingfisher, is an inhabitant of this part of the country; this bird is very rare on the Missouri.
Clark mentions “a fiew wild pigions about our Camp” — a single clause. Gass independently confirms the pigeons and adds turtle doves. Lewis, occupied with kingfishers and gnats, says nothing of either. The pigeons thus survive in the record only because two of the three narrators happened to glance up.
One small chronological discrepancy is worth noting: Lewis reports that “Sergt. Gass and party joined Capt. Clark at 10 A.M.,” a detail Lewis can only have learned later from Clark or Gass themselves, since Lewis remained at the lower camp. This is a reminder that Lewis’s journal, though dated July 12, was likely composed or revised after he had reunited with Clark’s party and pooled information.
The Captain’s Eye and the Sergeant’s
Lewis devotes a remarkable portion of his entry to the gnats, observing that the black gnat “dose not sting, but attacks the eye in swarms and compells us to brush them off or have our eyes filled with them.” Clark dispatches the same nuisance in five words: “musquitors & knats verry troublesom all day.” The contrast is characteristic. Lewis is the expedition’s naturalist-in-chief, drawn to species distinctions (kingfishers preferring clear tributaries to the muddy Missouri) and behavioral specifics. Clark is its logistician, tracking labor, distances, and supply.
Gass occupies a third position: the working sergeant who walks the seven miles between camps and reports what he sees along the way. His measurement of the Indian lodge — 216 feet in circumference — is precisely the kind of datum a carpenter would think to take and a captain might omit. His specification of the canoe lengths (“one 25 and the other 30 feet”) is similarly absent from both captains’ entries for this date.
Read singly, any one of these July 12 entries gives a serviceable account of the day. Read together, they reconstruct an expedition whose documentary completeness depended on the differing curiosities of three pens working in parallel.
