One Bear, Five Tape Measures
The events of May 5, 1805 are unusually well-attested: every journal-keeping member of the expedition wrote at length, and four of them recorded the dimensions of the same grizzly bear shot from the riverbank near the Porcupine. The shared measurements — head, neck, breast, foreleg, length, talons — circulated through the camp as a kind of standardized data sheet, and the parallel numbers in Gass, Ordway, Whitehouse, and Clark allow a rare look at how a single field observation propagated across the Corps.
Clark, who actually killed the animal with George Drouillard, supplies the kill narrative. He fired ten balls into the bear, five of them through its lungs — what he calls its “lights” — and still found it “verry hard to kill.” His estimate of the weight is 500 pounds. Ordway, working from camp talk rather than direct observation, raises the figure to “about 4 hundred after [being] dressed,” while Whitehouse splits the difference at “about 600 weight as he was killed.” The number drifts as it travels.
The measurements themselves drift less. Gass, Ordway, and Whitehouse all give the length nose-to-toe as 8 feet 7½ inches; Ordway’s manuscript reads 8 feet 1 inches, almost certainly a transcription slip, since his other figures match the consensus. Whitehouse’s entry tracks Ordway’s nearly clause for clause — “one of the hunters lay on the S. S. last night,” the half-gill of spirits, the catfish in the bear’s stomach, the six gallons of grease rendered — confirming the well-documented pattern of Whitehouse copying from or sharing a source with Ordway.
What Each Narrator Alone Preserves
Gass, characteristically terse, gives only the bear and the distance. He notes that “the sick man has become better,” contradicting Ordway and Whitehouse, who both report Joseph Field as worse:
Jo. Fields who was taken sick yesterday is some worse to day.
This is a small but real divergence in the record — Gass evidently heard a different report, or wrote before the day’s verdict on Field’s condition had settled.
Ordway alone preserves the near-disaster with the canoe: “jest as I went [to] set off with the canoe the bank fell in & all most filled it.” He also records that the bear was shot while swimming and that the shallow water alone kept the carcass from sinking — an operational detail Clark omits. Ordway’s footnoted Clark quotation,
it was a most tremendious looking animal and extreemly hard to kill.
matches the tone of Clark’s own field entry.
Clark contributes the anatomical comparison to the black bear: blunt talons, short tail, enlarged liver and lungs, and a stomach “ten times as large” containing flesh and fish. He also slips in two details no one else mentions — the men killed three elk and a buffalo, and the camp dog ran down a pronghorn “a fair race,” the antelope “verry pore & with young.”
Lewis, remarkably, does not describe the bear at all. His entry of the day is given over to ornithology: a careful comparative description of the lesser snow goose (his “white brant”) and what is almost certainly Ross’s goose or a small race of Canada goose, distinguished by its thicker, shorter beak, its smaller body, and its juvenile-sounding note. He records eye color (“the puple of a deep sea green incircled with a ring of yellowish brown”) and tail-feather count (sixteen, equal length). While Clark wrestled the grizzly into kegs of oil, Lewis was counting wing-feathers.
Division of Attention
The day illustrates the implicit division of labor between the two captains as clearly as any in the journals. Clark hunts, kills, measures, and butchers; Lewis walks, observes, and writes natural history. The enlisted journalists — Gass, Ordway, Whitehouse — orient toward the bear because the bear is the camp’s event, and they share their numbers. Lewis orients toward the brant because no one else will. Without his entry, the day would be remembered only for the grizzly; without the others, the grizzly’s dimensions would not survive in quadruplicate. The redundancy is the record’s strength: where the enlisted men agree, the measurement is firm; where they diverge, as on Field’s health or the bear’s weight, the gaps themselves are evidence of how news moved through a camp of thirty-odd men on a Sunday evening on the upper Missouri.
