The journals of 20 July 1805 capture the Corps of Discovery emerging from the rocky defile above the Great Falls into broader country, with the river party laboring upstream by towrope while William Clark’s reconnaissance pushed overland. Three narrators — Patrick Gass, Meriwether Lewis, and Clark himself — left accounts of the day. Read together, they show how a shared landscape produced markedly different texts depending on the writer’s vantage, register, and access to information.
The Smoke and What It Meant
All three journalists noted a column of smoke rising from a side valley, but their interpretations diverge in revealing ways. Gass, traveling with the canoes, recorded the simplest reading:
about 2 o’clock came to a level plain on the north side, from which we saw a strong smoke rising, and supposed it was from a fire made by Capt. Clarke.
Gass commits to a single, plausible explanation and moves on. Clark, viewing the same smoke from the opposite direction up the valley, was more circumspect:
I observe a Smoke rise to our right up the Valley of the last Creek about 12 miles distant, The Cause of this Smoke I can’t account for certainly tho think it probable that the Indians have heard the Shooting of the Partey below and Set the Praries or Valey on fire to allarm their Camps
Clark hedges (“can’t account for certainly,” “think it probable”) and, crucially, acts on his hypothesis: he leaves signs along his trail to reassure any Indians who might follow that his party came in peace. Lewis, writing from the river, initially mirrors Clark’s uncertainty — “we were at a loss to determine whether it had been set on fire by the natives… or whether it had been set on fire by Capt. C.” — but then asserts a definitive answer: “the first however proved to be the fact.” How Lewis came to that certainty is not stated in his entry; he may be writing with hindsight after rejoining Clark, a reminder that Lewis’s daily entries were sometimes composed retrospectively.
Currants, Creeks, and the Naturalist’s Eye
The same morning’s botany illustrates how differently the three narrators register detail. Gass offers a working man’s catalogue: “the finest currants I ever saw of different kinds, red, yellow and black: the black are the most pleasant and palatable.” Lewis, in contrast, expands the same observation into a full naturalist’s notice, mentioning gooseberries and serviceberries as well, recording that he “preserved some seeds,” and adding a market judgment:
this currant is really a charming fruit and I am confident would be prefered at our markets to any currant now cultivated in the U States.
Lewis also names a new tributary — Potts’s Creek, after John Potts — and describes a black woodpecker he tried unsuccessfully to shoot, an early notice of what would become Lewis’s woodpecker (Melanerpes lewis). Clark, occupied with overland navigation, mentions neither currants nor birds. Gass, working between these registers, conveys the crew’s sensory experience without Lewis’s taxonomic ambition.
The Body in the Landscape
Where Lewis’s prose tilts toward the scientific and Gass’s toward narrative summary, Clark’s brief entry is unusually corporeal. He notes that “my man York nearly tired out, the bottoms of my feet blistered,” and closes with the men’s feet “So Stuck with Prickley pear & cut with the Stones that they were Scerseley able to march at a Slow gate.” Lewis independently confirms the prickly pear menace from the river camp — “the prickly pears are so abundant that we could scarcely find room to lye” — but only Clark connects the cactus to bleeding feet and exhausted men. Gass, traveling by water, registers none of this overland suffering.
The note Clark left with the elk skin — recorded by both Gass (“a note, informing us he would pass the mountain he was then on, and wait for the canoes”) and Lewis (“a note informing me of his transactions and that he should pass the mounts which lay just above us and wate our arrival”) — is a small piece of evidence that the captains’ communication system functioned even when the parties were out of sight. The near-identical content of the two paraphrases suggests Gass either saw the note himself or heard it read aloud; Lewis’s version preserves slightly more of Clark’s own diction (“transactions”), hinting at closer proximity to the original.
