One River, Five Measurements of Cold
The day’s central fact — bitter cold for May — is registered by every narrator, but each calibrates it differently. Lewis offers a household measurement:
ice formed on a kettle of water 1/4 of an inch thick
Clark adds the instrument reading,
the Thermt. Stood this morning at 26 above 0 which is 6 Degrees blow freeseing
and repeats the kettle detail almost verbatim, suggesting the captains compared notes before writing. Ordway and Whitehouse, working the boats rather than observing from shore, record the cold through its effect on labor: ice
froze to oar poles as we poled where the sun Shined on us
in Ordway’s phrasing, echoed nearly word-for-word by Whitehouse — the documented copying pattern between the two sergeants is again visible. Gass alone reaches for an aesthetic register, noting that
The snow and green grass on the prairies exhibited an appearance somewhat uncommon
and pairing the frost with cottonwood leaves
as large as dollars
— a phenological detail no other narrator records.
The Sacrifice and the Scarlet Cloth
Two miles along the larboard side, the party encountered an Indigenous offering. Lewis describes it as
a curious collection of bushes which had been tyed up in the form of a faciene and standing on end in the open bottom it appeared to be about 30 feet high and ten or twelve feet in diameter
and supposes it
placed there by the Indians, as a sacrefice for some purpose.
Clark’s account confirms the structure but trims its size to
about 10 feet diamuter
— a striking discrepancy in dimension between the two captains observing presumably the same object. Clark also preserves something Lewis omits entirely:
three of our party found in the back of a bottom 3 pieces of Scarlet one brace in each, which had been left as a Sacrifice near one of their Swet houses
The scarlet cloth offering, the sweat lodge, and Clark’s interpretation that the bushes were left
as an offering to their medison which they Convinced protected or gave them relief
together form an ethnographic note absent from the other four journals. The sergeants pass the site without mention — they were on the water, not on shore.
Naming Porcupine River
The day’s geographic event is the naming of Porcupine River (modern Poplar River) and 2000 Mile Creek (modern Red Water Creek). Lewis provides the rationale:
we saw an unusual number of Porcupines from which we determined to call the river after that anamal
He devotes a long passage to the stream’s hydrology, calling it
the first of this discription that I have yet seen discharge itself into the Missouri
with transparent water and stiff blue-black clay banks, and speculates it
takes it’s source not far from the main body of the Suskashawan river
— a geopolitical conjecture about a possible route to
the Athebaskay country.
Clark, having walked up the river and waded it, supplies the empirical data Lewis lacks:
112 Steps from bank to bank
at one place,
38 steps wide
at the ford, water
near Knee deep.
The two captains’ accounts function complementarily — Lewis theorizing the continental geography, Clark measuring the channel with his feet.
Ordway and Whitehouse, predictably, confuse the two streams, with Ordway’s editor flagging that he
confuses the two streams passed during the day.
Whitehouse closes his entry with a small accident no other narrator records:
Got the Irons broke off the red perogue, which the rudder hung on.
A working detail, easily lost — the kind of incident the enlisted journals preserve precisely because the captains, focused on naming and mapping, do not.
What Each Narrator Adds
Gass alone gives the cottonwood-leaves-as-dollars image. Ordway alone records the goose nest with three eggs taken from driftwood, and a beaver shot from the bank. Whitehouse alone notes the broken pirogue ironwork. Lewis alone speculates about the Saskatchewan watershed. Clark alone documents the scarlet cloth and sweat lodge. The captains converge on the kettle ice; the sergeants converge on the frozen poles. The day’s fullest record exists only in the aggregate.
