The entries of July 24, 1805, offer an unusually clear demonstration of how the Lewis and Clark expedition’s parallel journals diverged in register, attention, and purpose. With the main party ascending the Missouri above the Great Falls and Captain Clark scouting overland in search of the Shoshone, the four narrators on this date — Patrick Gass, Joseph Whitehouse, Meriwether Lewis, and William Clark — produce accounts that, when read together, illuminate both the shared events of the day and the distinct documentary habits of each writer.
The Crimson Bluff: A Shared Landmark, Four Registers
All three river-party narrators take note of a colored bluff on the starboard (north) shore, but the descriptive register varies dramatically. Gass, characteristically economical, records only that the party
passed a bank of very red earth, which our squaw told us the natives use for paint.
His sentence is notable for two things: its brevity, and its acknowledgment of Sacagawea — referred to by the period term “squaw” — as the source of ethnographic information about Indigenous pigment use. Whitehouse, working in a middle register, hedges the color (“a yal- low or redish clift of rocks”) and omits the ethnographic detail entirely. Lewis, by contrast, brings the eye of the naturalist:
passed a remarkable bluff of a crimson coloured earth on Stard. intermixed with Stratas of black and brick red slate.
Where Gass sees a useful resource and Whitehouse a navigational landmark, Lewis records stratigraphy. The three accounts reveal a recurring pattern across the journals: Gass and Whitehouse often share a baseline of observed facts, while Lewis layers scientific vocabulary atop the same scene. Yet on this date it is Gass alone who preserves the Indigenous knowledge attached to the bluff — a reminder that the sergeant’s brevity does not always equate to lesser ethnographic value.
Lewis the Naturalist, Whitehouse the Inventory-Keeper
Lewis’s entry on this day is among his more discursive of the season. Beyond the bluff, he offers an extended meditation on beaver as geomorphic agents, arguing that
the beaver is then compelled to seek another spot for his habitation wher he again erects his dam. thus the river in many places among the clusters of islands is constantly changing the direction of such sluices… this anamal in that way I beleive to be very instrumental in adding to the number of islands with which we find the river crouded.
This is Lewis at his most speculative-scientific, advancing a theory of fluvial change. He follows it with a careful taxonomy of three snake species observed along the water, noting that he “examined their teeth and fund them innosent” of venom. Whitehouse, who saw many of the same animals, flattens the observation into list form: “Saw otter and beaver in great abundence… we Saw a great many different kinds of Snakes along the R[iver].” Whitehouse’s enumerative style — currants, rabbit berries (which he glosses with the French graisse de boeuf), willows, cedar, prickly pear — functions as a running inventory of the valley’s resources, a different but complementary mode of natural history.
Whitehouse also performs a small act of cross-party bookkeeping, noting that the river party “found a goat Skin which Cap? Clarks party had killed and left on Shore.” Lewis records the same find (“a goat or Antelope which had been left by Capt. Clark”), confirming the two detachments’ awareness of one another’s traces along the corridor.
Clark Overland: A Different Geography
Clark’s entry departs entirely from the river narrative. Scouting ahead by land, he describes a sequence of small streams, beaver dams, and a fat wild horse he could not approach. His landscape vocabulary is distinctive:
the mountains on either Side appear like the hills had fallen half down & turned Side upwards the bottoms narrow and no timber a fiew bushes only.
The image — mountains “fallen half down & turned Side upwards” — is geologically vivid in a way Lewis’s more formal stratigraphic notes are not, and it captures something of the tilted, faulted character of the country between the Gates of the Mountains and the Three Forks. Clark’s mileage and encampment, given only loosely (“a fiew miles”), contrast with Gass’s and Whitehouse’s identical river-party figure of nineteen miles, underscoring that the two detachments operated by different measures on this day.
Lewis’s entry closes on an anxious note absent from the others: a fear that some “considerable falls or obstruction” still lies ahead, tempered only by Sacagawea’s assurance “that the river continues much as we see it.” That Lewis names her testimony explicitly, while Gass refers to her information about the red earth, suggests that on July 24 her knowledge shaped both the geographic and the ethnographic content of the day’s record — a fact recoverable only by reading the four narrators side by side.
