The May 11, 1805 entries cluster around two events in the Missouri Breaks: a near-fatal grizzly encounter and Clark’s ascent of the first pine-bearing hills the expedition had seen along the river. Each narrator emphasizes different elements, and the comparison reveals how rank and assignment shaped what got recorded.
The Bratton Encounter, Told Five Ways
The man chased by the wounded grizzly was William Bratton, though only the editorial footnote in Ordway’s text names him. Lewis devotes the most narrative attention to the incident, opening with atmosphere — a party member “runing at a distance towards us and making signs and hollowing as if in distress” — before ordering the perogues to shore. Lewis’s entry as transcribed breaks off mid-scene, but the footnote attached to Ordway preserves Lewis’s later admission:
These bear being so hard to die, reather intimedates us all. I must confess that I do not like the gentlemen and had reather fight two Indians than one bear.
Ordway gives the most procedurally complete account: the man “had a lame hand,” was “walking on Shore towards evening,” “came running and hollowing to the perogues chased by a brown bair which he had wounded, bad,” and a hunting party then went out and finished the animal. Whitehouse’s version is nearly identical in structure and wording — “towards evening one of the party wounted a brown bair, and was chased by it to the perogues” — confirming the well-documented pattern of Whitehouse copying from or sharing a source with Ordway. Whitehouse adds only that the meat was “fat and good.”
Gass compresses the entire episode into a single sentence: “One of the men killed another large brown bear, about the size of the one lately killed.” No chase, no lame hand, no rescue party. Clark, remarkably, does not describe the bear encounter at all in the surviving entry — he was off on his own hunt and only learned on returning that “they had killed a fine fat Yellow bear below which detained them.” His phrasing (“Yellow bear”) is a useful color note that the other narrators flatten into “brown.”
Clark’s Solo Excursion and the First Pines
While the bear drama unfolded near the perogues, Clark was ashore on the starboard hills. His own entry frames the day around terrain and game inventory: “we observe in every derection Buffalow, Elk, Antelopes & Mule deer inumerable and So jintle that we Could approach near them with great ease.” He killed two mule deer, two buffalo bulls, and a beaver on the return.
Lewis, who stayed with the boats, nonetheless records Clark’s botanical findings in more detail than Clark himself does, noting that Clark “brought with him on his return som of the boughs of this pine it is of the pitch kind but I think the leaves somewhat longer than ours in Virginia.” Lewis then describes a dwarf cedar growing among the pines that “rises to the hight thre sometimes 4 feet, but most generally spreads itself like a vine along the surface of the earth.” This is the kind of specimen-grade observation Clark rarely supplied.
Ordway and Whitehouse both flag the pines as a milestone: “these hill[s] bair the first pine we have Seen on this River” (Ordway); “hills on the N. S. partly covred with pitch pine the first we have Seen” (Whitehouse). Gass omits the pines entirely.
Geology, Salts, and What Each Narrator Notices
Lewis and Clark both fixate on the mineral salts encrusting the gullies. Clark: “the gullies in maney places are white, and their bottoms one, two & 3 Inches deep of this mineral.” Lewis adds that the salts “may with a fether be swept up and collected in large quantities” and that he “preserved several specimines.” He also describes the loam dissolving in water “as readily as loaf sugar” and effervescing “like marle.” Neither sergeant nor private records any of this. The geological and chemical observation is entirely a captains’ province on this date.
Lewis alone reflects on the ongoing danger of the collapsing banks: “I sometimes wonder that some of our canoes or perogues are not swallowed up by means of these immence masses of earth which are eternally precipitating themselves into the river.” The enlisted journals treat the river as background; Lewis treats it as adversary.
The day’s distance — seventeen miles — is agreed by Gass, Ordway, and Whitehouse. Lewis and Clark do not state the mileage in these entries, a minor reminder that the sergeants’ journals often supply the logistical spine the captains’ more discursive entries leave out.
