The entries of May 27, 1805 capture the Corps of Discovery laboring up an increasingly broken stretch of the Missouri, where high winds delayed departure until ten in the morning and the men spent most of the day on the towing line. All four journalists — Meriwether Lewis, William Clark, Patrick Gass, and Joseph Whitehouse — record the same essential facts: a late start, swift current studded with rocky riffles, scarce timber, a single elk killed, and small herds of bighorn sheep on the bluffs. Yet their treatments of this shared day diverge sharply in register and emphasis.
Lewis and Clark: Parallel Geology, Diverging Detail
Lewis and Clark, as often, work in close coordination. Both describe the bluffs in mineralogical terms, cataloguing the colored stratas of clay, sandstone, and ironstone, and both note the recurring “concommutants” of the upper river: salts, coal, burnt hills, and pumice stone. Clark writes plainly of
Bluffs of various Coloured earth most commonly black with different quallities stone intermixed Some Stratums of Soft Sand Stone, Some hard, Some a dark brown & yellow hard grit
Lewis covers the same ground but with characteristic elaboration, identifying
large round kidneyformed and irregular seperate masses of a hard black Iron stone, which is imbeded in the Clay and sand.
The kidney-shaped iron concretions — almost certainly the same stones Clark describes generically as “hard dark gritey Stone” — appear only in Lewis’s entry. Lewis also offers a meteorological aside absent from Clark’s version, attributing the midday heat to “the high bluffs and narrow channel of the river.” Clark, by contrast, adds a hydrological note Lewis omits: the river “rises a little.” The two captains are clearly drawing on shared field observation, but each preserves details the other lets pass.
Whitehouse’s Working Vocabulary and the “Ibex”
Joseph Whitehouse, writing as an enlisted member of the party, gives the most physically immediate account of the day’s labor. He alone notes that the riffles forced the crew to “double man our perogues to git them over Safe,” and he alone records the precise mileage — thirteen miles — and the running tally from the Mandan villages and the mouth of the Missouri. Where Lewis writes of “Bighorned anamals,” Whitehouse uses an Old World comparison, calling the same creature an “Ibex or Mountain Sheep.” His landscape vocabulary is also more sensory and less geological:
no diews like other parts but barron broken rich Soil but too much of a desert to be inhabited, or cultivated.
Whitehouse notices what the captains do not bother to record: wild hyssop, rose bushes, mint along the shore, and mussel shells underfoot. His prose, less polished than Lewis’s, often catches the small textures of the country.
Gass and the Editorial Frame
Patrick Gass’s entry as it survives in the 1807 published version stands apart from the other three. Rather than narrating the day’s travel, Gass — or his editor David McKeehan — pauses to take stock, treating the day as a convenient milestone for “two or three general observations respecting the country we have passed.” He divides the route into two zones: the rich, timbered country from the Missouri’s mouth to the Platte, and the “good second rate land” stretching some fifteen hundred miles beyond. The published Gass also carries an interpolated footnote quoting Goldsmith on the Mufflon, an editorial flourish that compares the bighorn to the European wild sheep:
The Mufflon, or Musmon, though covered with hair bears a stronger similitude to the Ram than to any other animal
This learned digression, almost certainly McKeehan’s addition rather than Gass’s field note, reveals how the published journal was shaped for an Eastern reading public hungry for natural-history context. Whitehouse’s vernacular “Ibex” and Gass’s printed “Mufflon” are pointing at the same animal Lewis calls the Bighorn — three registers of zoological naming converging on a single creature on a single Montana hillside.
Patterns of Agreement and Silence
The convergences are unmistakable: all four narrators emphasize the desolation of the country, the scarcity of timber, and the labor of the ascent. The captains share a geological lexicon; the enlisted men share an interest in mileage, game, and botanical detail. Where Lewis reaches for taxonomic precision and Clark for hydrographic summary, Whitehouse documents the working day and Gass — through his editor — reframes the journey for posterity. Read together, the four entries demonstrate how a single day on the Missouri produced not one record but a layered archive, each voice preserving what the others let slip.
