July 16, 1805 placed the Corps of Discovery at a geographic threshold: the point where the Missouri River cuts into the first range of the Rocky Mountains. The three journal-keepers present — Captain Meriwether Lewis, Captain William Clark, and Sergeant Patrick Gass — all describe the same sequence of events (a forgotten ax, an abandoned Indian encampment, a buffalo breakfast, the entrance into the mountains), but the texture of their accounts diverges sharply. Read together, the entries form a layered portrait of how rank, literary ambition, and observational habit shaped the expedition’s documentary record.
Shared Skeleton, Divergent Detail
All three narrators record the morning’s logistical errand. Lewis notes that he “sen one man back this morning for an ax that he had carelessly left last evening some miles below,” and Clark echoes the same fact almost verbatim: “dispatched one man back for an ax left a fiew miles below.” The verbal parallel is characteristic of the captains’ practice of comparing notes, with Clark frequently absorbing Lewis’s phrasing into his own entry. Gass, drafting independently and at a sergeant’s remove, omits the ax episode altogether, beginning instead with the captains’ departure: “Captain Lewis and two men went on ahead to the mountain to take an observation.”
The abandoned Indian camp produces a similar pattern. Lewis describes “about 40 little booths formed of willow bushes to shelter them from the sun,” abandoned roughly ten days earlier, and speculates they belonged to “snake Indians.” Clark mirrors the count and the inference — “passed about 40 Small Camps, which appeared to be abandoned about 10 or 12 days… Suppose they were Snake Indians” — but adds a detail Lewis missed entirely:
a fiew miles above I Saw the poles Standing in thir position of a verry large lodge of 60 feet Diamater, & the appearance of a number of Leather Lodges about, this Sign was old & appeared to have been last fall
This is a recurring pattern across the journals: Clark, leading the main party on the river, often catalogs material traces (lodge poles, dimensions, seasonal estimates) that Lewis, ranging ahead overland, does not see. Gass for his part reduces the encampment to silence, his entry compressing the day’s ethnographic content out entirely.
Three Registers of Landscape
The most striking divergence is in how each writer renders the entrance into the mountains. Lewis seizes the moment as an occasion for set-piece description, naming a landmark and offering a panoramic view:
at this place there is a large rock of 400 feet high wich stands immediately in the gap which the missouri makes on it’s passage from the mountains; it is insulated from the neighbouring mountains by a handsome little plain which surrounds it base on 3 sides and the Missouri washes it’s base on the other… this rock I called the tower.
Lewis frames the rock aesthetically (“a most pleasing view”), sentimentally (“the country we are now about to leave”), and even gastronomically — recording that he “ate of the small guts of the buffaloe cooked over a blazing fire in the Indian stile” and “found them very good.”
Clark, by contrast, converts the same landscape into measurements and bearings:
this Range of mountains appears to run N W & S E and is about 800 feet higher than the Water in the river faced with a hard black rock… its General Course is S. 10° W. about 30 miles on a direct line
Where Lewis names the tower, Clark gives a compass course. Both note the 800-foot elevation and the “hard black” rock — Lewis identifying it as “grannite” — confirming the captains conferred on the geological observation. Clark also delivers the day’s botanical inventory (cottonwood, box elder, choke cherry, currants, “a Spcie of Shomake”), a register Lewis skips on this date.
Gass’s Working Summary
Gass’s entry, the shortest of the three, exemplifies the sergeant’s functional prose. He marks the navigational change — “the water became more rapid: but the current not so swift as below the falls” — flags an unwell crewman (a detail neither captain mentions), and closes with the day’s mileage: “This day we went about 20 miles.” His geological note is blunt where Lewis’s is mineralogical: “There are great hills of solid rock of a dark colour.” Gass writes for a reader who needs to know what was done, not what it looked like or what it meant.
Taken together, the three entries demonstrate how the expedition’s documentary apparatus distributed labor across registers. Lewis composes; Clark measures and inventories; Gass summarizes. The Gates of the Mountains entered the historical record three times on a single day — as literary tableau, as surveyor’s data, and as a sergeant’s daily log.
