The journal entries for August 24, 1804, offer an unusually clear demonstration of how the four principal expedition writers divided narrative labor. Clark produces the day’s longest and most descriptive entry; Lewis confines himself to a single technical lament; Gass condenses the day for a popular reader; and Whitehouse, evidently working from notes out of sequence, files an entry that does not match the other three at all. Read together, the entries reveal both the mechanics of expedition record-keeping and the distinctive sensibility each narrator brought to the page.
Clark as Primary Observer: Bluffs, Berries, and Elk
Clark carries the day’s narrative weight. He twice describes the same blue clay bluff on the larboard side, noting that it had “been lately on fire and is yet verry Hott” — a phenomenon he tests empirically, observing in his second draft that the earth “is too hot for a man to bear his hand in” at any depth. He catalogs apparent coal and an “emence quantity of Cabalt or a Cristolised Substance,” registering the expedition’s standing charge to inventory mineral resources.
Clark also lingers over a fruit that clearly delighted him:
Great quantities of a kind of berry resembling a Current except double the Sise and Grows on a bush like a Privey, and the Size of a Damsen deliciously flavoured & makes delitefull Tarts, this froot is now ripe
This is the buffaloberry (later called “rabbit berry” by Gass), and Clark’s double-drafted description — first comparing the bush to a damson, then to privet — shows him refining his botanical eye in real time. He closes with hunting: a deer packed in by his servant York, two buck elk, and two wounded animals he could not track because, as he frankly admits, “my ball was So Small to bleed them well.”
The Spirit Mound Digression
Embedded in Clark’s entry is the day’s most ethnographically significant passage: his and Lewis’s plan to visit a conical hill northwest of the White Stone river’s mouth. Clark records the local tradition with care:
this hill … is Supposed to be a place of Deavels … that they are in human form with remarkable large heads and about 18 inches high; that they are very watchfull and ar armed with Sharp arrows with which they can kill at a great distance
Clark notes that Maha (Omaha), Sioux, and Otoe alike share the belief, and that “three Maha men fell a sacrefice to their murceyless fury not meany years since.” His framing — calling the story a “fable” while transcribing it in detail — typifies his ethnographic register: skeptical in stance, generous in record. Neither Lewis, Gass, nor Whitehouse mentions the Spirit Mound tradition for this date, making Clark the sole source for one of the expedition’s most-cited Indigenous narratives.
Gass Compresses, Lewis Specializes, Whitehouse Diverges
Gass, whose published journal was edited for a reading public, distills Clark’s sprawling entry into a tidy paragraph. He preserves the burning cedar bluffs, the mineral substances, and the elk hunt, and he supplies a useful gloss Clark omits — that the berries’ “Indian name … in English means rabbit berries.” Gass’s register is plainer and more declarative, the prose of a non-commissioned officer writing for posterity rather than for the captains’ files.
Lewis, by contrast, writes only one sentence, and it concerns instrumentation:
This day the Chronometer stoped again just after being wound up; I know not the cause, but fear it procedes from some defect which it is not in my power to remedy.
The entry is characteristic of Lewis in this stretch of the journey: when Clark is producing the daily narrative, Lewis often confines himself to scientific or mechanical observations. The chronometer failure has navigational consequences he understands acutely, and his admission of helplessness — “not in my power to remedy” — is a rare moment of professional vulnerability.
Whitehouse’s entry presents a puzzle. He describes Drouillard and Colter returning with an elk, twelve Oto Indians arriving at Council Bluffs, and a council convening at 7 p.m. — events that belong to early August, not August 24, by which date the expedition was well past Council Bluff. The misdated entry is a useful reminder that enlisted men’s journals were sometimes copied or reconstructed after the fact, and that Whitehouse’s manuscript cannot always be trusted as a same-day witness. Where Clark, Gass, and Lewis converge on the burning bluffs and the elk hunt, Whitehouse’s August 24 lives in a different week entirely.
