The expedition’s May 18, 1805 entries document a relatively uneventful nineteen-mile day along the Missouri River Breaks, with the party towing the boats by cordelle against a westerly wind. Yet the five surviving accounts — from Lewis, Clark, Gass, Ordway, and Whitehouse — illustrate how differently each narrator filtered the same day, and how the journals reinforce one another on points of fact while preserving distinctly individual emphases.
The Captains’ Concerns: Weather, Timber, and Hides
Lewis and Clark’s entries track each other closely in structure, as is typical, but Clark adds a detail Lewis omits: this was the first rain of the season. Clark writes:
at about 12 oClock it began to rain and continued moderately for about 11/2 hours, not Sufficient to wet a man thro his clothes; this is the first rain Since we Set out this Spring
Lewis, by contrast, does not mention the rain at all in his entry, focusing instead on river morphology — the narrowing channel, gentle current, and disappearance of willow from the banks. Both captains note that Clark, walking on shore, killed four deer including two mule deer. Clark alone records the reproductive detail that one doe carried three fawns and two others carried two each, and he frames the kill economically:
those deer are fat, & their Skins tolerable good, which are now in demand with us for clothes Such as Legins & Mockersons
Lewis echoes the skin-quality observation but generalizes it (“the skins are now good, they have not yet produced their young”), missing or omitting the specific fawn counts Clark gathered firsthand. The pairing illustrates a recurring division of labor in the journals: Clark, walking the bank, supplies field-level specificity; Lewis, aboard the boats, synthesizes landscape and natural-history generalities.
Ordway and Whitehouse: The Copying Pattern, Confirmed Again
The Ordway-Whitehouse relationship is on full display. Whitehouse’s entry tracks Ordway’s almost phrase by phrase — the rattlesnake killed at morning, the beaver caught overnight, the 7 o’clock departure, the rose bushes, the dinner halt at the timbered bottom “filled with buffaloe Elk Deer,” the clearing weather at 2 o’clock, and the closing tally of Clark’s three deer (Whitehouse adds this as a postscript: “N.B. (Capt Clark killed three deer)”). Ordway, however, preserves details Whitehouse drops: the “verry high rough hills, which look mountainous,” the large creek passed at 3 o’clock on the north side, and the observation that
the Missourie is gitting clear and gravelly bottom, & Shore we passed no falling in banks as we did below
This last detail — the cessation of the caving banks that had plagued the lower river — is a piece of geomorphological observation that neither captain records and that Whitehouse omits when condensing Ordway. Ordway also reports a discrepancy with the captains: he tallies Clark’s deer at three, while Lewis and Clark themselves record four. Whitehouse, copying Ordway, inherits the undercount.
Gass: Compression to the Point of Disappearance
Gass’s entry is the shortest by a wide margin and the most stripped-down. He notes the broadening bottoms after noon, the persistent pine on the hills, the showers of rain followed by hail in the afternoon, and the nineteen-mile camp opposite an island. Gass is the only narrator to mention hail — neither captain nor either enlisted journalist records it. Whether this represents a localized weather event Gass witnessed from a different position in the convoy, or simply a detail the others judged unworthy of entry, cannot be resolved from the record. But it is a useful reminder that Gass, despite his brevity, occasionally preserves observations unique to his vantage.
Taken together, the five entries converge on the day’s skeleton — wind, towline, nineteen miles, Clark’s deer, the timbered bottom — but each narrator adds at least one observation the others omit: Clark the season’s first rain and the fawn counts, Lewis the disappearance of willow, Ordway the end of the caving banks, Whitehouse essentially nothing original, and Gass the hail. The day is unremarkable in expedition terms, but the journals as a composite preserve more than any single one alone would suggest.
