The entries of May 31, 1805 offer an unusually rich opportunity for cross-narrator comparison. All four journalists — Lewis, Clark, Gass, and Whitehouse — were struck by the same sequence of sandstone cliffs and curiously regular black stone walls along the Missouri in what is now central Montana. Yet each man processed the spectacle through a different lens: Lewis reaches for architectural metaphor and sustained literary description, Clark echoes him in compressed form, Gass distills the scene to a single arresting image, and Whitehouse catalogs measurements and meat.
The Same Cliffs, Four Registers
Lewis devotes the longest passage of the day to the geology, and his prose is unmistakably belletristic. He describes how water has worn the soft sandstone
into a thousand grotesque figures, which with the help of a little immagination and an oblique view at a distance, are made to represent eligant ranges of lofty freestone buildings, having their parapets well stocked with statuary; collumns of various sculpture both grooved and plain, are also seen supporting long galleries in front of those buildings.
Clark, writing the same evening, plainly draws on either Lewis’s notes or a shared conversation. His phrasing tracks Lewis’s closely but is shorter and less ornamented:
the Hills and river Clifts of this day exhibit a most romantick appearance … in maney places this Sand Stone appears like antient ruins some like elegant buildings at a distance, Some like Towers &c. &c.
The shared phrase “most romantic/romantick appearance” and the parallel “elegant buildings” / “eligant ranges of lofty freestone buildings” strongly suggest collaborative drafting — a pattern scholars have long noted between the two captains. Clark, however, adds a detail Lewis’s surviving fragment omits: the black stone walls run “from about 1 foot to 12 feet thick and are perpendicular,” and where they meet the river they sometimes “meet at right angles.” Clark the surveyor cannot resist the geometry.
Gass, writing for an enlisted audience and (eventually) a popular readership, compresses the entire vision into one of the most quotable lines of the expedition:
They seem as if built by the hand of man, and are so numerous that they appear like the ruins of an ancient city.
Where Lewis catalogs parapets, columns, and galleries, Gass goes straight to the controlling metaphor — the ancient city — and stops. His estimate of the cliffs at “200 feet high and not more than eight feet thick” splits the difference between Clark’s measurements of the black walls and the broader sandstone bluffs.
Whitehouse’s Different Priorities
Whitehouse, the private, records the same day in a register almost devoid of literary ambition but rich in granular detail the officers omit. He notes the time the rain began (“ab. 11 oC.”), the dram of spirits issued at noon, the precise tally of game, and — crucially — that the men preserved the horns of the bighorn sheep:
the hunters came in at dark had killed 1 black taild Deer 2 Ibex or mountain Sheep (rams) which had handsom large horns. we took care of the horns in order to take them back to the U. States.
Neither captain mentions the intent to ship the horns east, though Clark confirms the kill of “2 animals with big horns.” Whitehouse also alone records that “one man Saw a large pond or Small lake, out in the plains on South Side” — a third-hand observation the officers either did not hear or chose not to log. He gives the cliff height as “100 feet from the Surface of the water,” agreeing with Clark’s measurement of the black walls rather than Gass’s higher figure.
Labor Versus Landscape
A second axis of difference runs through the day’s entries: how much attention each narrator gives to the physical suffering of the men. Lewis is emphatic. He describes the crews dragging canoes through icy water
even to their armpits … so frequent are those point that they are one fourth of their time in the water … in short their labour is incredibly painfull and great, yet those faithfull fellows bear it without a murmur.
Clark covers the same ground — the broken tow rope, the slippery mud that defeats the moccasins, the near-capsizing of the perogue he himself was riding in — but with a surveyor’s economy. Gass, who was one of those “faithfull fellows,” says nothing of the labor at all, only that the country was mountainous and game plenty. Whitehouse likewise omits the suffering, noting merely that “the current has been Swift all this day.” The pattern is consistent across the journals: the captains romanticize the men’s hardship; the men themselves rarely dwell on it.
Taken together, the four entries for this day form a small case study in how a single landscape refracts through rank, audience, and temperament. Lewis composes for posterity; Clark consolidates and measures; Gass crafts a memorable image; Whitehouse counts the horns.
