The expedition’s progress on May 9, 1805, through the Missouri Breaks produced four journal entries that, read together, expose how dramatically the recording habits of the captains diverged from those of the enlisted men. Lewis and Clark cover the same ground — a vast dry riverbed entering from the larboard side and a memorable supper of boudin blanc — while Sergeant Patrick Gass and Private Joseph Whitehouse offer markedly different versions of the same day, one terse to the point of error, the other surprisingly observant.
Big Dry River: The Captains in Concert
Lewis devotes the bulk of his entry to what he names Big Dry River, calling it
the bed of the most extraordinary river that I ever beheld. it is as wide as the Missouri is at this place or 1/2 a mile wide and not containing a single drop of runing water
Clark’s account tracks Lewis’s almost beat for beat, describing the same feature as
a river (or the appearance of a river) on the Lard. Side the bend of which as far as we went up it or could See from a high hill is as large as that of the Missouri at this place which is near half a mile
Both captains note the dry creek a mile below, and both speculate about the source of the absent water. Lewis hypothesizes the channel drains “as far as the black hills,” while Clark suggests it conveys “the melted Snow, & heavy rains” from “the high mountanious Countrey which is Said to be between this river & the Yellow Stone river.” The convergence is too close to be coincidence — the captains were clearly comparing notes — but Clark’s geographical framing (orienting the drainage toward the Yellowstone) is his own contribution, consistent with his role as the expedition’s principal cartographer. Lewis, characteristically, lingers over geology, sediment, and bank composition, identifying “black or yellow clay or a rich sandy loam” and revising his earlier guess that the Missouri’s sparkling sand was “granulated talk” in favor of quartz.
Gass and Whitehouse: Silence and Surprise
The most striking divergence comes from Gass, whose entry omits the Big Dry entirely. He records only that the party
were obliged to halt and lie by during the day, on account of hard wind
This contradicts both captains, who describe favorable winds and steady progress — Lewis explicitly notes “the wind being favourable we used our sails and proceeded very well.” Gass’s compressed entry, often a paraphrase of overheard conversation, here appears to garble the day’s conditions. The contrast suggests Gass either wrote retrospectively from imperfect memory or conflated this day with another.
Whitehouse, by contrast, supplies details neither captain bothered to record. He alone preserves a vivid scene of human-wildlife encounter:
the Game is getting So pleanty and tame in this country that Some of the men has went up near enofe to club them out of their way
He also gives the dry river a measured width — “at high water mark about 437 yards wide” — and reports that the party named a campsite stream “warners River.” Where Lewis philosophizes about hydrology and Clark maps drainages, Whitehouse documents the texture of camp life and the practical naming conventions of the men.
Register and the Boudin Blanc
The day’s most famous passage belongs to Lewis, who pivots from geological speculation to culinary anthropology, recording Toussaint Charbonneau’s preparation of buffalo-gut sausage:
this white pudding we all esteem one of the greatest delacies of the forrest
Clark mentions the same hunt — “Capt Lewis also killed one which verry good meat” — but says nothing of the pudding. Whitehouse notes only that “Some of the party killed two buffaloe.” Gass omits Charbonneau entirely. The episode illustrates Lewis’s distinctive willingness to indulge in literary flourish and ethnographic detail, a register no other narrator on the expedition shared. Clark adds his own unique observation: four “pleaver” (plover) shot by Lewis, “larger & have white breast & the underfeathers of the wings are white” — a natural-history note Lewis himself, oddly, did not record in this day’s entry.
Read across all four narrators, May 9 demonstrates the layered nature of the expedition’s record: Lewis supplies extended description and reflection, Clark supplies geographical reasoning and supplementary natural history, Whitehouse supplies the lived camp detail, and Gass — on this day at least — supplies a cautionary reminder that even sergeant-rank journals are not always reliable on weather or distance.
