This analysis was generated with AI assistance and reviewed by a human editor.
July 13, 1805 marked a logistical turning point for the Corps of Discovery. The grueling Great Falls portage was nearly complete, the iron-frame boat experiment had been abandoned days earlier, and the captains were preparing to reunite their divided party for the push toward the Rocky Mountains. The three journals kept this Saturday — by Meriwether Lewis, William Clark, and Sergeant Patrick Gass — converge on the same events but diverge sharply in scope, detail, and tone.
Three Registers of the Same Morning
Clark, encamped below with the canoe-builders, opens with the close observation of a man minding his work:
a fair Calm Morning, verry Cool before day we were visited by a Buffalow Bull who came within a fiew Steps of one of the Canoes the men were at work.
The detail is domestic — a near-miss with a curious bull at a working camp. Clark then notes Lewis’s overland arrival at 9 o’clock almost in passing.
Lewis, by contrast, treats his own arrival as the day’s narrative spine. He describes embarking the remaining baggage in six small canoes, bidding
a cheerfull adue to my camp
at the White Bear Islands, and crossing roughly three miles southwest to strike the Missouri before walking up to Clark’s camp. Where Clark records the fact, Lewis records the journey — characteristic of the captains’ divided labor as journalists.
Gass, the enlisted-man narrator, condenses the whole reunion to a single sentence: Lewis
came up here, accompanied by the squaw. He informed us that the canoes had started with all the baggage from the former encampment, which we had called White-bear camp.
Gass’s reference to Sacagawea simply as “the squaw” — and his preservation of the camp’s nickname — illustrates the sergeant’s economical register, which prioritizes movement of personnel and supplies over scenic or ethnographic detail.
The Mysterious Lodge — A Detail Only Lewis Records
The most striking divergence on this date is Lewis’s lengthy description of an enormous abandoned structure he passed on his overland walk. Neither Clark nor Gass mentions it, almost certainly because neither saw it. Lewis devotes a substantial paragraph to its dimensions and possible purpose:
it was formed of sixteen large cottonwood poles each about fifty feet long and at their larger end which rested on the ground as thick as a man’s body; these were arranged in a circular manner at bottom… in the center of this fabric there was the remains of a large fire; and about the place the marks of about 80 leather lodges.
Lewis measures its circumference at 216 feet and speculates it was
most probably designed for some great feast, or a council house on some great national concern.
He explicitly notes that
I never saw a similar one nor do the nations lower down the Missouri construct such.
This is Lewis at his most ethnographically curious — measuring, comparing, hypothesizing. The episode is a useful reminder that the captains’ separate movements produced asymmetric records: significant cultural observations sometimes survive in only one journal because only one journalist was present to make them.
Provisions, Pemmican, and Pests
All three narrators converge on the day’s hunt. Lewis reports that
The hunters killed three buffaloe today which were in good order
and offers a remarkable accounting of the Corps’s appetite:
we eat an emensity of meat; it requires 4 deer, an Elk and a deer, or one buffaloe, to supply us plentifully 24 hours.
Clark confirms the kill —
The Hunters killed 3 Buffalow
— but adds a logistical complaint Lewis omits:
the most of all the meat I had dried for to make Pemitigon.
The buffalo were welcome, but they replaced pemmican stocks Clark had been carefully curing for the mountain crossing.
On the mosquitoes, Gass and Clark agree without embellishment. Gass:
The musquitoes are very troublesome.
Clark:
The Musquetors & Knats verry troublesom all day & night.
Lewis, focused on the lodge, the wind that forced Ordway’s canoes ashore, and the wild pigeon he shot, says nothing of the insects — a small but telling instance of how the captain-journalist’s literary ambitions sometimes crowded out the bodily miseries that the working men recorded as a matter of course.
Patterns of Authorship
Read together, the three entries map a familiar division of journalistic labor on the expedition: Lewis the discursive observer and ethnographer; Clark the practical chronicler of camp, weather, and provisions; Gass the brisk recorder of personnel and progress. None of the three appears to be copying another on this date — the lodge, the buffalo bull at the canoes, and the loss of dried pemmican each survive in only one journal, underscoring how much of the expedition’s record depends on the accident of who was watching where.
