The expedition’s entries for April 28, 1805 — written some fifteen miles above the Yellowstone confluence — offer an unusually clean case for comparing how the four journal-keepers processed a single day on the river. The party made twenty-four miles under a favorable southeasterly wind, halted to dine where Clark had walked ahead, and camped in a cottonwood bottom on the north side. All four narrators agree on the distance and the camp. Beyond that, their accounts diverge in instructive ways.
The Captains’ Shared Draft
Lewis and Clark’s entries for this date are so closely parallel that they must derive from a shared field conversation, if not a shared notebook. Both record the same observations in the same order: the broken country, the handsome bottoms, the strata of coal, the burnt hills, and — strikingly — the same negative finding. Lewis writes that the bluffs "exhibit their usual mineral appearances, some birnt hills but no appearance of Pumicestone," and Clark independently notes "burnt appearances in maney places, in and about them I could find no appearance of Pumice Stone." The doubled negation suggests the captains were actively testing a hypothesis about the origin of the burnt bluffs and wanted the absence of pumice on the record.
Yet the captains are not simply duplicating one another. Lewis adds a vivid mineralogical detail Clark omits:
the salts still increase in quantity; the banks of the river and sandbars are incrusted with it in many places and appear perfectly white as if covered with snow or frost.
Clark, for his part, supplies the naturalist’s detail Lewis lacks — a careful description of antelope coloration:
The Antilopes are nearly red, on that part which is Subject to change i e the Sides & 2/3 of the back from the head, the other part as white as Snow
Clark also enumerates the strata of the bluffs more precisely than Lewis: "dark brown, yellow a lightish brown, & a dark red &c." The pattern is consistent with what scholars have long observed elsewhere in the journals: Lewis tends to generalize and synthesize, while Clark, walking on shore, records the granular visual evidence.
The Sergeants Working Independently
Ordway and Gass were not party to the captains’ conversations in the same way, and their entries show it. Gass is terse to the point of austerity, compressing the day into four sentences about distance, bluff height, and the shrinking timber of the bottoms. He alone offers a comparative geographic generalization:
the banks on the Missouri are not so high as below it, and the sand bars are more in the middle of the river.
This observation about sandbar position appears in no other narrator’s entry — a reminder that Gass, despite his brevity, occasionally registers details the captains miss.
Ordway’s entry is by far the longest of the four and the most narratively textured. Where Lewis flatly notes that "four brown bear" were seen and one was "fired on and wounded," Ordway tells the story:
towards evening we Saw a large black bair Swimming the River we went on Shore to head him & hopes to kill him. one man Shot & wounded it but it ran in to thick bushes So that we could not find it.
Ordway also supplies the detail that the antelope on the riverbank were carrion — "Saw Some dead on the edge of the river, which I suppose the wolves had killed" — an inference no other narrator records. And Ordway alone names the previous night’s catch: "caught a large beaver last night."
Register and Color: Bear, Bluff, Brick
A small but telling discrepancy concerns the bears. Lewis calls them "brown bear"; Clark says he saw "three black bear"; Ordway describes "a large black bair Swimming the River." The party was still working out its taxonomy of the western bears in late April 1805, and the inconsistency within a single day’s entries reflects that uncertainty rather than disagreement about the animals themselves.
The narrators also differ in how they render the colored bluffs. Clark catalogues the strata in the abstract language of an observer ("dark brown, yellow… & a dark red"). Ordway reaches for a domestic simile: the bluffs are "of a redish coulour, nearly like brick." Lewis offers his snow-and-frost image for the salt incrustations. The captains’ similes work upward from the familiar to describe the strange; Gass declines simile entirely.
Taken together, the four entries for April 28 illustrate the layered documentary architecture of the expedition: a captains’ tier producing closely coordinated scientific observations, and a sergeants’ tier — Ordway narrative and detailed, Gass spare and comparative — recording independently enough to preserve facts the captains overlook.
