The Great Falls portage on June 25th, 1805 generated one of the more textually rich days of the expedition, with five narrators recording the same events at varying distances from them. Lewis remained at the upper camp directing operations on the iron boat; Clark, mildly ill, kept company only with Charbonneau on the opposite side; the enlisted men shuttled canoes and baggage across the plains. The redundancy among Gass, Ordway, Whitehouse, Lewis, and Clark allows a clear view of how information traveled — and distorted — within the corps.
Joseph Fields and the Third Bear
The day’s most dramatic incident — Joseph Fields’s encounter with grizzlies up the Missouri — survives in two substantively different versions. Gass reports the bare outline: Fields was sent up the river for elk, was “attacked by 3 brown bears, that were near devouring him,” escaped “by running down a steep bank into the water,” fell, “injured his gun, and hurt one of his hands,” and returned. Lewis, who debriefed Fields directly, gives the fuller and more careful reconstruction:
he had seen two white bear near the river a few miles above and in attempting to get a shoot them had stumbled uppon a third which immediately made at him being only a few steps distant; that in runing in order to escape from the bear he had leaped down a steep bank of the river on a stony bar where he fell cut his hand bruised his knees and bent his gun.
Lewis adds the editorial gloss absent from Gass: “this man has been truly unfortunate with these bear, this is the second time that he has narrowly escaped from them.” Notably, Clark — writing on the opposite bank from Lewis — does not mention the bear incident at all, recording instead only that Shannon and R. Fields “killed no Elk, Several Buffalow & Deer.” The episode reached Clark’s journal not at all, suggesting how news fragmented across the divided camp.
The Ordway-Whitehouse Mirror
The well-documented copying relationship between Ordway and Whitehouse is on full display. Their entries for June 25th are nearly identical in phrasing — “below the falls the plains are inferior in point of Soil to those below, more Stones on the Sides of the hills” appears verbatim in both. Both list “choke cherryes Goose berrys red & yallow berry, & red purple currents,” both record “Sergt Pryor Sick,” and both close with the dancing “untill 10 oClock all in cheerfulness and good humour.” Strikingly, Clark’s own journal carries the same botanical inventory in nearly identical order — “great quantites of Choke Cheries, Goose burres, red & yellow berries, & red & Purple Currents” — indicating a shared source, likely circulated orally or via Clark’s notes, that Ordway transcribed and Whitehouse then copied from Ordway.
Whitehouse’s distinct contribution comes the next morning, when he himself fell ill: “I took sick this evening I expect by drinking too much water when I was hot. I got bled &c.” This first-person medical detail breaks the copying pattern and is preserved nowhere else.
Sailing on Dry Land
Three narrators independently record the day’s most memorable image — wind-driven canoes rolling across the plains on truck wheels. Clark frames it as worthy of remark:
the Sales were hoised in the Canoes as the men were drawing them and the wind was great relief to them being Sufficeritly Strong to move the Canoes on the Trucks, this is Saleing on Dry land in every Sence of the word
Lewis, hearing it second-hand, echoes the phrase almost exactly: “this is really sailing on dry land.” The convergence suggests Clark and Lewis discussed the day’s events and arrived at a shared formulation. Ordway, by contrast, records the haul plainly without mentioning the sail at all — a footnote in the Wisconsin edition explicitly flags the omission. The phrase entered the expedition’s vocabulary through the captains, not the sergeants.
What Each Narrator Preserves Alone
Lewis alone notes the wild rye “now heading,” the young blackbirds beginning to fly, the water terrapins, and his unsuccessful fishing attempt. Clark alone records his coffee — “a riarity as I had not tasted any Since last winter” — and the red iron-bearing cliffs around his camp. Gass alone gives the precise tally of “100 pounds of tallow” returned with the meat, where Lewis says “about 100 lbs.” Ordway and Whitehouse, working from shared phrasing, contribute the texture of camp life — mended moccasins, the fiddle, the tied-up loads. Removed individually, each narrator would leave a measurable gap; combined, they reconstruct a single day with unusual completeness.
