Two Camps, Two Rivers
The Corps spent June 27, 1805 at the Great Falls portage, finishing the iron-frame boat and ferrying the last canoe and baggage. Lewis and Clark both write from this stationary post, their entries closely aligned. Lewis details the workshop assignments — Whitehouse detained for illness and set sewing skins with Frazier, Shields and Gass shaving horizontal bars from crooked timber, Lewis himself “continued to act the part of cook in order to keep all hands employed.” Clark, at the lower camp, completed a draught of the river from the Missouri’s mouth to Fort Mandan, intended for deposit as insurance “to guard against accedents.” Patrick Gass’s brief entry corroborates both: the remaining canoe retrieved, two elk killed near camp, the hailstorm, and the late return of Drewyer and J. Fields with nine elk and three bears.
Ordway and Whitehouse, however, describe a wholly different scene — a moving party on a swift river, passing Boulder Creek, dining on a mountain sheep Clark shot across the water, noting Sacagawea’s familiarity with the country “up to hir nation at the 3 forks.” These entries belong to late July, not June 27, and their placement here appears to be a transcription or pagination artifact in the published journals. The Whitehouse entry even references Lewis setting out overland with Gass, Drewyer, and Charbonneau — an event that did not occur at the Great Falls portage. Read against Lewis, Clark, and Gass, the Ordway and Whitehouse texts cannot be reconciled to this date and are set aside below.
The Hailstorm and the Crimson River
The day’s central event, recorded by three narrators in agreement, was a violent afternoon storm. Lewis logs its arrival precisely:
a cloud arrose to the S. W. and shortly after came on attended with violent Thunder Lightning and hail &c.
Gass preserves the dimensions the captains omit:
Some of the lumps of ice that fell weighed 3 ounces, and measured 7 inches in circumference. The ground was covered with them, as white as snow.
Lewis adds a useful calibration — Drewyer and Fields, four miles upriver, reported hail “of no uncommon size” — establishing that the storm’s severity was sharply local. Clark’s entry then supplies the downstream consequence the others miss: the small tributaries, swollen by runoff, ran “in great torrents, and partake of the Choler of the earth over which it passes — a great part of which is light & of a redish brown.” Lewis independently observes the same phenomenon and reasons toward it geologically:
the water on this side of the river became of a deep crimson colour which I pesume proceeded from some stream above and on this side. there is a kind of soft red stone in the bluffs and bottoms. of the gullies in this neighbourhood which forms this colouring matter.
The two captains, writing from separate camps, converged on the same explanation without consultation — a small but telling instance of parallel observational reasoning within the command.
The Bear in the Tree
Lewis devotes his longest passage to a hunting story Drewyer and Fields brought back. Suspecting bears in a brushy bottom, the two hunters climbed a leaning tree, settled on its branches twenty feet up, and called out:
when thus securely fixed they gave a hoop and this large bear instantly rushed forward to the place from whence he had heard the human voice issue, when he arrived at the tree he made a short paus and Drewyer shot him in the head.
Lewis records the measurements with the precision he reserves for natural-history specimens — forefeet nine inches across, hind feet “eleven and 3/4 in length & exclusive of the tallons and seven inches in width” — and the methodological aside, “it is worthy of remark that these bear never climb.” Gass mentions only the body count; Clark does not mention the hunt at all. The episode survives because Lewis, idle as camp cook, had time to listen and write.
Lewis closes with a domestic detail no other narrator preserves: a bear came within thirty yards of camp the previous night and ate roughly thirty pounds of buffalo suet hanging on a pole, while his dog “seems to be in a constant state of alarm with these bear and keeps barking all night.” Clark, writing the same day from the same expedition, ends instead with the drowned buffalo passing over the falls — “Cloudy all night, Cold.” The two captains, sharing weather and river, parted ways in what they thought worth setting down.
