The entries for May 23, 1805 offer an unusually clean comparison of how the four journal-keepers of the Corps of Discovery handled an identical day on the upper Missouri. The party was moving past the mouth of what Lewis christened Teapot Creek, with frost thick enough to glaze the oars and a distant mountain range — likely the Little Rocky or Judith Mountains — visible to the northwest. Each narrator saw the same river, the same bear lost beneath driftwood, the same frozen morning. What they chose to record diverges sharply.
Register and Length: From Fragment to Treatise
Patrick Gass’s surviving entry is the briefest by an order of magnitude — a single fragment noting ice as thick as window glass
and the passing of two creeks and two islands. Whether this reflects loss in transmission or Gass’s habitual compression, the carpenter-sergeant’s prose strips the day to its navigational bones.
Joseph Whitehouse, by contrast, produces a serviceable enlisted-man’s log of roughly 200 words, organized chronologically around the day’s incidents: the hunter rejoining camp with five deer, the dinner halt, the accidental fire, the lost bear. Whitehouse alone preserves a vivid mishap that the captains omit entirely:
one of the hunters took his rifle & bullett pouch on Shore the fire broke out into the woods, and burned up his shot pouch powder horn & the stalk of his rifle.
This destruction of a hunter’s equipment — a serious loss in country where resupply was impossible — goes unmentioned by Lewis and Clark. It is precisely the sort of camp-level detail that the captains, writing at a higher altitude of command, tend to elide.
Lewis the Naturalist, Clark the Surveyor
Meriwether Lewis writes at greatest length and with the broadest range of concerns. His entry moves from hydrology to pharmacology to mammalogy in a single paragraph. On the alkaline creek waters he reports a personal experiment:
I have tryed it by way of experiment & find it moderately pergative, but painfull to the intestens in it’s opperation.
He then digresses on the prairie dog (his Burrowing Squirrel
), puzzling over how the animal survives without visible water sources, and closes with observations on molting geese, troublesome mosquitoes, and the blooming wild rose. Lewis treats the day as a field notebook for natural history.
William Clark covers much the same ground but in a markedly different key. Where Lewis estimates the distant range at about 70 miles long runing from E to W
with its eastern extremity about 30 mes. distant,
Clark records a mountain which appears to be 60 or 70 miles long bearing E. & W is about 25 miles distant.
The bearings and distances are nearly identical — Clark gives the range a slightly closer reading — and the parallel phrasing strongly suggests the captains compared notes, as they routinely did. Clark also opens with a precise thermometer reading (the Thrmotr. Stood at the freesing point this morning i e 32 a 0
) that Lewis omits, a reminder that Clark typically carried the instrumental record while Lewis carried the descriptive one.
Shared Material and Independent Witness
The lost bear appears in three of the four entries with revealing variations. Whitehouse calls it a brown bear
shot towards evening
that Sank in under a large drift of wood.
Lewis describes a large fat brown bear which took the water after being wounded and was carried under some driftwood where he sunk.
Clark’s version — a large fat Bear, which we unfortunately lost in the river, after being Shot took the water & was Carried under a drift
— sits closest to Lewis’s phrasing, sharing the words large fat
and the construction took the water.
Whitehouse’s account, while covering the same event, uses independent vocabulary, suggesting he wrote from his own observation rather than copying a captain’s draft.
The game tally also reveals the captains’ coordination. Both Lewis and Clark report Clark’s shore hunt yielding four deer and an elk; Clark adds a beaver that Lewis does not mention. Both close with nearly identical summaries of game seen — five buffalo, numerous elk and deer, five bear — though Clark alone counts the two antelope.
Read together, the four entries form a layered record in which Whitehouse preserves enlisted-camp incident, Gass offers terse navigation, Clark anchors the day in measurement and miles, and Lewis spins outward into the natural philosophy of an unfamiliar country. None of the four is redundant; each supplies what the others leave out.
