May 26, 1805, on the Missouri. Three published journals in this corpus record the day: Meriwether Lewis’s, Patrick Gass’s 1807 book (David McKeehan’s prose), and Joseph Whitehouse’s. Lewis, walking the river hills, writes the first view of the Rocky Mountains. Gass and Whitehouse, towing below, write mountain sheep, sandstone cliffs, and a rapid at dusk. No published William Clark journal for this date survives in this corpus. Whitehouse still records the captains’ name for the sheep: “Ibex as Cap! Clark calls them.”
The mountain sheep as “Ibex”
Both enlisted journalists give space to the mountain sheep, and both adopt the borrowed name. Gass describes a male in measured, 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 two animals “running along in flocks where the bluffs were to appearence nearly perpenticular,” 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.
He attributes the naming: “2 mountain Sheep or Ibex as Cap! Clark calls them.” The aside shows Whitehouse taking officer terminology while marking that the name is not his own. Gass uses “Ibex or mountain sheep” without attribution, as if the term were settled. The 1807 Pittsburgh edition then prints a long footnote, quoting Goldsmith on the Alpine ibex and arguing that Gass’s animal “much more nearly resembles the wild sheep, called the Muftion or Musmon.” That note is McKeehan’s, not a field sentence.
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.” He also logs a hare. Gass says they “saw few animals of any kind, but the Ibex or mountain sheep,” then a buffalo in the evening. Whitehouse has Lewis in that kill: “Cap! Lewis & one of the hunters killed 2 buffaloe.” Lewis’s own page for the day does not mention the buffalo.
Two accounts of the same rapid
The day closed with a hard passage, and here the two enlisted journals align on difficulty and hour while differing on how the work felt. 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 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.
They agree on a south-side camp in timber, with old Indian sign in Whitehouse. They differ by a mile: Gass twenty-one, Whitehouse twenty-two. Whitehouse names the wading and the swamping waves; Gass abstracts the labor into uniting crews. Gass adds that the grove was “the first we had seen during the day.” Whitehouse has been towing “under high bluffs” that are “verry Steep & barron,” with “high Clifts of Sand Stone on each Side.”
What the enlisted men do not write
Neither Gass nor Whitehouse mentions the Rocky Mountains. Lewis, walking out “in the after part of the day,” climbed “one of the highest points in the neighbourhood” and wrote the view that the canoe journals omit:
as from this point I beheld the Rocky Mountains for the first time, I could only discover a few of the most elivated points above the horizon, the most remarkable of which by my pocket compass I found bore N. 65° W. these points of the Rocky Mountains were covered with snow and the sun shone on it in such manner as to give me the most plain and satisfactory view.
The pleasure of being “so near the head of the heretofore conceived boundless Missouri” did not last. The “snowey barrier” and the hardships it promised “in some measure counterballanced the joy I had felt in the first moments in which I gazed on them”; then he refuses to “anticipate evils” and will “believe it a good comfortable road untill I am compelled to believe differently.” That foreboding is entirely absent from Gass and Whitehouse. They have high bluffs, sandstone, a barren corridor, horns, a hare, and yards of towline. Whether they did not see the peaks from the river, did not recognize them, or did not think them worth recording, the silence is evidence of a divided day’s work: Lewis on the summit, the enlisted men in the rapid.
