The entries of April 27, 1805 capture a single windbound day at the junction of the Missouri and Yellowstone rivers, but the four narrators present produce strikingly different documents. Patrick Gass and John Ordway log mileage and weather; William Clark sketches the discomfort of sand-blasted boatmen; Meriwether Lewis composes what amounts to a reconnaissance memorandum for a future federal post. Read together, the entries reveal a clear division of labor in the journals — and a rare moment in which Lewis and Clark openly disagree on a question of judgment.
Four Registers of the Same Wind
Gass, characteristically terse, compresses the entire day into two clauses: a fine morning, a forced halt from one until four, and eight miles made before camp on the north side. Ordway, working in the same enlisted-man tradition, expands only slightly, noting that the party set off at nine and that
the wind rose So high from the N. W. and the Sand flew so thick from the sand bars that we halted about 1 oClock, to wait untill the wind abates.
Ordway logs ten miles to Gass’s eight — a small but typical discrepancy between the two sergeants’ reckonings. Clark, writing as a captain rather than a logbook keeper, registers the human texture of the halt: the wind
blew the Sand off the Points in Such clouds as almost Covered us on the opposit bank.
Where Gass and Ordway record that the party waited, Clark records what waiting felt like, calling it his “unpleasent Situation.” He also catalogs the day’s wildlife — antelope, elk, swan, geese, ducks, beaver — and notes pointedly that despite this abundance, “we Kill nothing but what we can make use of,” a small ethical aside absent from the other accounts.
Lewis the Surveyor
Lewis’s entry dwarfs the others and operates in an entirely different mode. While the boats sat pinned to the bank, he walked the point alone, measuring distances, noting elevations, and drafting a site evaluation for a hypothetical fortified post. His prose is that of an engineer-administrator: the woodland extends “about a mile”; the low plain is “a few inches higher than high water mark”; a flood channel runs “60 or 70 yards wide”; a small lake lies “about 200 yards wide” along the edge of the high plain. From this survey he derives a recommendation:
on the point of the high plain at the lower extremity of this lake I think would be the most eligible site for an establishment.
Strikingly, Lewis then records — and overrules — Clark’s contrary opinion:
Capt Clark thinks that the lower extremity of the low plane would be most eligible for this establishment; it is true that it is much nearer both rivers, and might answer very well, but I think it reather too low to venture a permanent establishment, particularly if built of brick or other durable materials.
Clark’s own journal makes no mention of this disagreement; the debate survives only because Lewis chose to memorialize it. Lewis grounds his rejection of Clark’s preferred site in a geomorphological argument that anticipates modern fluvial science: “so capricious, and versatile are these rivers, that it is difficult to say how long it will be, untill they direct the force of their currents against this narrow part of the low plain.” In a few years, he warns, the plain — and any fort upon it — would be undercut and lost.
What Each Narrator Sees, and Misses
The cross-narrator pattern here is unusually sharp. Gass and Ordway, working from the boats, see the wind as an obstacle to mileage. Clark, also boatbound, sees it as a physical assault and as an occasion to remark on the party’s restraint with game. Only Lewis, ashore and walking, sees the confluence as a future asset of the United States — a place to be platted, fortified, and defended against the rivers themselves. His isolation is literal: when the wind rose, the perogues could not cross to retrieve him, and he reports almost comically that he
was under the necessity therefore of shooting a goose and cooking it for my dinner.
Clark confirms this from the opposite bank: “Capt. Lewis walked on Shore in the Point to examine & view the Countrey and could not get to the boats untill night.” The two captains’ entries thus interlock — Clark supplying the external view of Lewis’s day, Lewis supplying the intellectual content Clark could not see. Gass and Ordway, meanwhile, do not mention Lewis’s absence at all. The captain’s daylong survey, which produced one of the most detailed site recommendations in the journals, was invisible from the boats.
