May 6, 1805 produced a full slate of entries — Lewis, Clark, Ordway, Whitehouse, and Gass all wrote — yet the day’s events were modest: a sail under easterly wind, two elk killed by Clark, a beaver or two taken, a brown bear sighted swimming the Missouri, and the passing of several broad but waterless streambeds entering from the south. The interest lies in how differently five men registered the same twenty-six miles.
The Dry-River Problem
The day’s geographic puzzle is the cluster of wide, sand-bedded channels entering the Missouri from the larboard side carrying little or no water. Gass reduces the matter to a single sentence: a river “about 200 yards wide; but the water of this river sinks in the sand on the side of the Missouri.” Ordway notes the same 200-yard stream and leaves a blank for its name. Whitehouse skips the streams almost entirely, attending instead to terrain and to the fact that “the bottoms is all trod up by the Game, and different paths in all directions.”
Clark records the streams matter-of-factly and offers a working hypothesis:
the little water of those Creeks & the little river must wash the low Country, I believe those Streams to be the Conveyance of the water of the heavy rains & melting Snows in the Countrey back
Lewis, given to longer reasoning, takes the same observation and extends it into a full paragraph of plains hydrology — naming the channels Little Dry Creek, Big Dry Creek, and Little Dry River, cataloguing their pebble colors (“transparent, white, green, red, yellow or brown”), and inferring that their sources lie in “level low dry plains… to the vicinity of the black hills,” where spring snowmelt briefly fills them. He cross-references his own weather diary to argue that summer, autumn, and winter rainfall in such country is negligible. The synthesis is recognizably Lewis’s: Clark supplies the hypothesis in one sentence; Lewis builds the regional climatology around it.
The Bear That Got Away
A brown bear swam the Missouri ahead of the boats. Ordway: “we Saw a brown bair Swimming the River before us.” Whitehouse echoes him almost verbatim: “Saw a brown bair Swim the River before us” — one of many days on which Whitehouse’s phrasing tracks Ordway’s closely enough to suggest direct copying or a shared evening source. Gass omits the bear entirely. Clark omits it as well.
Only Lewis develops the sighting, and he develops it psychologically rather than zoologically:
I find that the curiossity of our party is pretty well satisfyed with rispect to this anamal, the formidable appearance of the male bear killed on the 5th added to the difficulty with which they die when even shot through the vital parts, has staggered the resolution several of them
The remark is the day’s most valuable cross-narrator insight: the previous day’s grizzly killing — recorded with bravado in several journals — has begun to alter the party’s appetite for hunting these animals. Lewis frames it almost teasingly (“others however seem keen for action with the bear; I expect these gentlemen will give us some amusement shotly”), but the underlying point is that the men have recalibrated. None of the enlisted journalists admits this; only the captain notices, or at least only he writes it down.
Hunting as Routine
Clark’s elk kill appears in every entry but his own characterization of it is plainest: “neither of which was fat, we saved the best of the meat.” Lewis converts the same incident into a statement about the expedition’s changed circumstances:
it is now only amusement for Capt. C. and myself to kill as much meat as the party can consum
Ordway and Whitehouse note the elk without comment on quality or sufficiency. Gass, characteristically terse, does not mention the elk at all, recording only mileage, weather, and the dry river. The pattern is consistent with Gass throughout this stretch: he writes the shortest entries and reserves them for what a sergeant needed to log — distance, camp side, weather, terrain features large enough to navigate by.
Mileage estimates converge tightly: Gass and Ordway agree on 26 miles, Whitehouse offers “about 27,” and the captains do not specify. The agreement, unusual on lower-river days, suggests the sail under steady easterly wind made distance easy to estimate.
