The events of May 25, 1805 were modest by expedition standards: an 8 a.m. start delayed by the meat canoes, a day of toeing against a swift current, eighteen miles made, and a camp on the south side of the Missouri. What distinguishes the date is the killing of the expedition’s first bighorn sheep — three of them, by Drouillard, Clark, and Bratton — and the resulting scramble among four narrators to describe an animal none had seen before. The entries reveal a striking division of labor and register among the journalists.
Lewis and Clark: A Shared Description
The most conspicuous cross-narrator pattern is the near-verbatim agreement between the captains. Lewis opens his natural-history passage by noting that the head and horns of Drouillard’s ram “weighed 27 lbs” and that the animal “was somewhat larger than the male of the common deer.” Clark records the identical weight and phrasing:
the head and horns of the male which Drewyer killed to day weighed 27 lbs it was Somewhat larger than the Mail of the Common Deer
From there the two descriptions march in lockstep through anatomy — the prominent brow bone, the “deep sea green” pupil with a “silvery” iris, the divided black hoof “hollowed and sharp on the under edge like the Scotch goat,” the white rump patch, the dark-tipped tail. The convergence is too close to be coincidence; one captain copied or dictated to the other, a practice well documented elsewhere in the journals. Clark’s spelling (“Mail” for male, “perpotion,” “Colour”) and Lewis’s (“boddy,” “prominant,” “butocks”) differ, but the syntactic skeleton is shared. Clark, however, presses further than Lewis on this date, continuing into dentition (“Eight fore teeth in the underjaw and no canine teeth”) and horn morphology (“compressed, bent backwards and lunated; the Surface Swelling into wavey rings”) — details Lewis’s surviving entry breaks off before reaching.
Gass and Whitehouse: The Enlisted Men’s Register
The sergeants’ and privates’ journals operate in an entirely different idiom. Patrick Gass offers a brisk, classificatory paragraph aimed at a reader who has never heard of such a creature:
some of the party killed three of what the French and natives call mountain sheep; but they very little resemble sheep, except in the head, horns and feet.
Where Lewis catalogues the iris and pupil, Gass settles for “a fine soft hair” and a dun coat with white belly and rump. Notably, Gass alone records that “Captain Clarke calls them the Ibex” — a nomenclatural detail confirmed by Clark’s own heading (“a female Ibex or big horn animal”) but absent from Lewis’s entry. Gass thus preserves a moment of onboard taxonomic debate that the captains themselves do not foreground.
Joseph Whitehouse splits the difference. He gives the bighorn only a short notice — “the ram had large horns which turned back of a gradual taper” — and emphasizes instead what the captains omit: that these sheep “were poor and not as large as the natives represented, but these are the first we have killed.” Whitehouse is the only narrator to register the gap between Indigenous reports and the animals actually in hand.
Details Only One Narrator Catches
Each journal preserves something unique to its author. Gass alone describes the eroded badlands hills as “great heaps of clay, washing away with every shower,” and he is the most circumstantial about the day’s accident: a man attempting to climb a bluff “had his shoulder dislocated; it was however replaced without much difficulty.” Whitehouse identifies the injured man — “Gibson one of the hunters putt one of his Shoulders out of place to day but got it in again” — a name the captains do not supply on this date. Whitehouse is also the most attentive landscape observer, noting “high bluffs & knobs and hills partly covred with pitch pine timber” and a dinner halt on “a beautiful level thin timbred Island.”
Lewis, meanwhile, is the only narrator to describe the labor of the day in detail: the toe line, the gravel bars at gully mouths where “the water run with great violence, and compelled us in some instances to double our force.” Clark, walking on shore and hunting, omits the boatwork entirely.
Read together, the four entries form a layered record: the captains’ coordinated scientific description of a new species; Gass’s plainer summary preserving the working name “Ibex”; and Whitehouse’s attention to the men, the timber, and the discrepancy between Native testimony and observed fact. No single journal would suffice; the bighorn of May 25 emerges only from their combined witness.
