The entries for May 28, 1805 offer an unusually clear case study in how four members of the Corps of Discovery could narrate a single day along the upper Missouri in radically different registers. Sergeant Patrick Gass disposes of the day in two sentences. Private Joseph Whitehouse offers a brisk inventory of riffles, islands, game, and weather. Captains Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, by contrast, produce extended narratives that overlap in striking ways — sharing observations, vocabulary, and even specific measurements — while diverging on which incidents merit emphasis.
Shared Observation, Divergent Emphasis
Lewis and Clark clearly compared notes, or at least the same physical evidence, before composing their entries. Both captains record the same artifacts drifting downstream — a worn lodge pole and a football — and both interpret these as proof of Indians upriver. Lewis goes further, identifying the football’s style:
the football is such as I have seen among the Minetaries and therefore think it most probable that they are a band of the Minetaries of Fort de Prarie.
Clark, characteristically, reports the find without ethnographic speculation:
picked up on the Shore a pole which had been made use of by the Nativs for lodge poles, & haul’d by dogs it is new and is a Certain Sign of the Indians being on the river above a foot ball and Several other articles are also found to Substantiate this oppinion-.
Whitehouse, working at a greater remove, also notices the items — “we found an Indians (?) foot ball floating down the river & dog poles also” — but the parenthetical question mark betrays his uncertainty about what he is looking at. Gass omits the artifacts entirely. The pattern is consistent: Lewis interprets, Clark substantiates, Whitehouse records, Gass condenses.
The same hierarchy governs the day’s hunting. Whitehouse credits Clark with killing “a mountain Sheep & Deer” around 10 A.M.; Lewis confirms that “Capt. C. walked on shore in the early part of the day and killed a big horned anamal”; Clark himself adds the detail that interests him most — “their fauns are nearly half grown” — which Lewis develops into a speculation about lambing season: “I beleive the bighorn have their young at a very early season, say early in March.”
The Ropes, the Bull, and the Limits of the Sergeant’s Page
Where Lewis and Clark diverge most sharply is in the day’s central drama. For Lewis, the day is dominated by the danger of the towlines:
our ropes are but slender, all of them except one being made of Elk’s skin and much woarn, frequently wet and exposed to the heat of the weather are weak and rotten; they have given way several times in the course of the day but happily at such places that the vessel had room to wheel free of the rocks and therefore escaped injury
Clark notes the same hazard in compressed form — “our tow. ropes are all except one of Elkskin, & Stretch and Sometimes brake which indanger the Perogues or Canoe” — but his entry’s energy is reserved for an episode Lewis does not record at all: a buffalo bull swimming the river at night, charging through camp, and somehow threading the sleeping party without injury. Clark uses the incident to christen the camp, naming the nearby stream Bull Creek and the larger creek Thompsons Creek “after a valuable member of our party.”
That this remarkable nocturnal encounter is absent from Lewis’s entry — and from Whitehouse’s and Gass’s — is itself instructive. Either the bull arrived after the others had completed their entries, or Clark alone judged it worth preserving. Whitehouse, who often catches incidents the captains overlook, here adds his own small contributions: a “gang of Elk” in the bottom, beaver sign along the shores, and the “Some thunder & Small Showers of rain which lasted about 2 hours.” Both captains note this thunder as the first heard since Fort Mandan, a detail Whitehouse reports without that comparative frame.
Register and Role
Gass’s two-sentence entry — “proceeded on through this desert country until about 4 o’clock P.M. when we came to a more pleasant part. We made twenty-one miles and encamped on the North side” — is not a failure of observation but a different genre. His mileage figure agrees with Whitehouse’s “21½ miles,” suggesting the enlisted men shared a reckoning. The “desert country” giving way to “a more pleasant part” telegraphs in miniature the same transition Lewis develops at length: the hills receding, the bottoms widening, the islands appearing, and the land becoming “again fertile” — a landscape Lewis calls “quite reviving after the drairy country through which we had been passing.”
Read together, the four entries reconstruct the day more fully than any one of them alone: Lewis supplies the analytical frame, Clark the vivid incident and the place-names, Whitehouse the granular catalogue, and Gass the bare itinerary.
