Two Captains, Two Workloads
The June 19 entries divide cleanly along rank. Lewis remains at the lower portage camp managing personnel, provisions, and the sick; Clark is in the field, reconnoitering the portage route from the white bear islands. The enlisted journalists — Gass, Ordway, and Whitehouse — record the camp’s collective tasks in compressed form, while the captains preserve the day’s substantive incidents.
Lewis’s entry is unusually dense. He dispatches Drouillard, Reubin Field, and Shannon up the north side toward Medicine River to hunt elk, explicitly because there is more timber on that river than the Missouri
and he expects better game. He completes the cache, waxes his powder canister stoppers, and has the iron boat frame clensed of rust and well greased
— the first concrete preparation for the experimental vessel that will fail spectacularly two weeks later. Whitehouse alone among the enlisted men records the purpose of the elk hunt:
to hunt in order to prepare Elk Skins for the Iron boat.
Gass and Ordway mention the hunters but not the reason, suggesting Whitehouse either had access to Lewis’s stated objective or, as is often the case, drew on Ordway’s notes and added detail from another source.
Sacagawea’s Relapse
Lewis is the only narrator to record Sacagawea’s setback. After days of recovery, she walked out and gathered the white apples of which she eat so heartily in their raw state, together with a considerable quantity of dryed fish
, and her fever returned. Lewis rebuked Sharbono severely
for permitting it and dosed her with diluted niter and, at 10 P.M., thirty drops of laudanum. Whitehouse offers only the brief notice that our Intrepters wife Some better
— a phrase that, given Lewis’s account, was true only of the morning. The discrepancy illustrates how the enlisted journals often capture a single moment of a day that the captains track hour by hour.
The sequence also shows Lewis operating as the expedition’s physician with characteristic confidence in his pharmacopoeia, and as a disciplinarian toward Charbonneau, whom he holds responsible for his wife’s diet.
Clark in the Field, and the Lost Notes
Clark’s entry is the day’s scouting record. He searches the island for the white bear, fails to find it, then ascends a small creek and the Missouri bend to identify the portage route. His conclusion — that the best nearest and most eassy rout would be from the lower part of the 3rd or white bear Island
— establishes the line the party will follow over the coming weeks. The wind that Ordway, Whitehouse, and Lewis all note from different quarters (Ordway and Whitehouse give N.W. and West; Lewis simply calls it violent; Clark specifies S.W. off the Snowey mountains
) cost Clark a portion of his field notes:
in my last rout I lost a part of my notes which could not be found as the wind must have blown them to a great distance.
The loss is a small archival tragedy recorded only by Clark himself.
Clark also closes with an image the others miss entirely — Summer duck Setting great numbers of buffalow all about our Camp
— while Whitehouse independently notes large gangs of buffalow on the Side hills on the opposite Shore
. The two observations together confirm the camp was ringed with game on both banks.
The Buffalo Bull at Night
Lewis alone preserves the day’s closing incident. After dark, his dog Seaman barked very much and seemed extreemly uneasy
; the sergeant of the guard reconnoitered with two men, suspecting Indians or a white bear, and discovered instead that a buffalo bull had attempted to swim the river above camp, been beten down by the stream
, landed below, and run off. None of the enlisted journalists mention it — an indication that the disturbance was contained near Lewis’s quarters and resolved before it became camp-wide news.
Whitehouse’s Mileage Note
One detail belongs to Whitehouse alone: we are now 2580 odd miles from the mouth of Missourie.
Neither captain records cumulative mileage on this date. Whitehouse’s running tally, idiosyncratic among the journalists, occasionally provides a benchmark the official record omits.
