The journals of May 26, 1805 reveal a striking divergence of attention among the expedition’s narrators. Captain Lewis, ranging ahead on foot, recorded his first sight of the Rocky Mountains and the mingled awe and apprehension that vista produced. The enlisted journalists Patrick Gass and Joseph Whitehouse, laboring with the canoes below, fixed their notice instead on the day’s hunting, the geology of the river corridor, and the difficult passage of a rapid at dusk. Read together, the entries form a layered portrait of a single day on the Missouri — one in which the strategic horizon and the tactical present sit side by side.
The Bighorn as “Ibex”
Both Gass and Whitehouse devote substantial space to the mountain sheep killed by the hunters, and both adopt the captains’ borrowed nomenclature of “Ibex.” Gass describes the animal in measured, almost specimen-label prose:
One of our men killed a male, which had horns two feet long and four inches diameter at the root.
Whitehouse, writing of what may be the same animal or a companion kill, supplies a different metric — weight rather than length:
one of these Ibex which was killed to day, had verry large horns. the head & horns weighed 27 pounds.
Whitehouse also explicitly attributes the naming to the captain: “2 mountain Sheep or Ibex as Cap! Clark calls them.” This small aside is revealing. It shows Whitehouse self-consciously adopting officer terminology while signaling that the name is not his own. Gass, by contrast, uses “Ibex” without attribution, as if the term were settled. The published edition of Gass’s journal carries an editorial footnote disputing the identification altogether, citing Goldsmith’s natural history and proposing that the animal more nearly resembles the Mediterranean musmon. The footnote is the editor’s, not Gass’s, but it illustrates how the expedition’s improvised zoology was being relitigated almost as soon as it reached print.
Whitehouse adds a behavioral observation Gass omits: that the sheep “keep on high Steep clifts & bluffs & mountains in order to keep out of the reach of other larger animals they are verry Suple & run verry fast.” This is the kind of inferential natural-history note more often associated with the captains’ journals, and it suggests Whitehouse was attentive to ecological reasoning, not merely event-logging.
Two Accounts of the Same Rapid
The day closed with a difficult passage through rapids, and here the two enlisted journals align closely enough to suggest either shared experience faithfully recorded or some degree of cross-consultation. Gass writes:
At dark we came to large rapids, where we had to unite the crews of two or three canoes, to force them through. It was sometime after night before we could encamp.
Whitehouse’s version is longer and more physical:
this rapid had considerable of a fall, which gave us Some trouble to git over our crafts but by towing & waiding in the water & holding the canoes from filling in the waves, we all got Safe over by dark.
The two men agree on the difficulty, the late hour, and the south-side camp in a small grove with old Indian sign. They differ by a mile in their reckoning — Gass logs twenty-one, Whitehouse twenty-two — a small discrepancy typical of the expedition’s parallel record-keeping. Whitehouse’s prose is the more sensory of the two, naming the wading and the swamping waves; Gass abstracts the labor into a single sentence about uniting crews.
What the Enlisted Men Do Not See
Most striking is what neither Gass nor Whitehouse mentions: the Rocky Mountains. Lewis, writing separately, recorded his first view of the snowy peaks and confessed that the prospect “in some measure counterballanced the joy” of nearing the Missouri’s source. That note of strategic foreboding is entirely absent from the enlisted journals of the same date. Gass and Whitehouse describe “high bluffs,” “high Clifts of Sand Stone,” and country that Whitehouse calls “verry Steep & barron,” but the great barrier on the horizon does not enter their pages. Whether they did not see the mountains from the river, did not recognize them, or simply did not think them worth recording, the silence is itself a kind of evidence — a reminder that the expedition’s most quoted geographic moments often belong to the captains alone, while the men in the canoes were measuring the day in horns, hares, and yards of towline.
