The journal entries for July 6, 1805, written from the Great Falls Portage in present-day Montana, offer an unusually clear case study in narrator divergence. All three writers — Sergeant Patrick Gass, Captain Meriwether Lewis, and Captain William Clark — describe the same day, the same camp, and the same labor force. Yet the entries differ so dramatically in length, content, and register that a reader encountering only one would form a misleading impression of the day’s character.
The Storm: Convergence and Divergence
Lewis and Clark both open with the predawn weather, and the parallels in phrasing suggest the captains compared notes — or one drew on the other. Lewis records:
about day a heavy storm came on from the S W attended with hail rain and a continued roar of thunder and some lightning. the hail was as large as musket balls and covered the ground perfectly.
Clark’s account is strikingly similar in structure and detail:
at day light this morning a verry black Cloud from the S W, with a Contined rore of thunder & Some lightening and rained and hailed tremendiously for about 1/2 an hour, the hail was the Size of a musket ball and Covered the ground.
The shared simile — hail the size of a musket ball — and the matching compass bearing point to the captains’ habitual practice of cross-checking observations. Lewis adds a practical detail Clark omits: the men collected some of the hail, which “kept very well through the day and served to cool our water.” Clark, by contrast, adds a domestic note absent from Lewis: “I cought Some Small fish this evening.”
Gass, remarkably, does not mention the storm at all. His entry concludes: “This was a beautiful and pleasant day.” The discrepancy is not error but selection. Gass writes after the fact and at compressed length; the morning’s violence had passed by midday, and his summary captures the prevailing condition rather than the dramatic incident. Where Lewis and Clark are meteorological observers, Gass is a laborer reporting on whether the weather permitted work.
The Boat, the Hunters, and the Division of Attention
All three narrators note the day’s two principal activities: work on Lewis’s experimental iron-frame boat and the dispatch of hunters for buffalo hides to cover it. Gass’s compressed phrasing — “to work were engaged at the boat; and four went down the river to hunt buffaloe, in order to get their skins to cover our craft” — efficiently summarizes what Lewis and Clark distribute across longer entries. Clark records that four men went in two canoes “to kill Buffalow, for their Skins & Meat”; Lewis specifies that the hunters proceeded “to the head of the rappids as we had determined last evening,” a detail neither of the others preserves.
Lewis alone registers anxiety about the boat itself: “These showers and gusts keep my boat wet in dispite of my exertions. she is not yet ready for the grease and coal.” The possessive — my boat — is telling. The iron-frame vessel was Lewis’s personal project, designed before the expedition, and the entry’s worry over weather delay foreshadows the failure that would follow days later. Clark, writing of the same craft, refers to it impersonally as “the boat.”
Lewis’s Naturalist Detour
Lewis closes his entry with two observations that have no counterpart in Clark or Gass: a note on ripening red and yellow currants (“reather ascid as yet”) and a longer description of a burrowing animal he calls “a remarkable small fox”:
they are extreemly watchfull and take reffuge in their burrows which are very deep; we have seen them no where except near these falls.
The animal Lewis describes — colonial, burrowing, restricted in range — is almost certainly the swift fox (Vulpes velox), and the passage is among the earliest scientific notices of the species. That neither Clark nor Gass mentions it underscores the captains’ informal division of documentary labor: Lewis took the lead on natural history, Clark on cartography and river detail, while Gass produced the spare narrative chronicle that would become, in 1807, the first published account of the expedition.
Reading the Three Together
July 6, 1805, is not a day of major events. No portage was completed, no decision made, no encounter recorded. Yet the convergence of three independent entries on a single uneventful day clarifies what each narrator was for. Lewis writes for science and posterity; Clark writes for the record and the river; Gass writes for the reader who wants to know, simply, what kind of day it was. Only by reading them together does the day reappear in its full texture — beautiful and pleasant, yes, but also hailed upon, anxious, and quietly attentive to a small fox that had never before entered the written record.
