The entries of July 2, 1805 offer an unusually clean comparative case. All three journalists — Captain Meriwether Lewis, Captain William Clark, and Sergeant Patrick Gass — describe the same sequence of events at the upper end of the Great Falls portage: a morning shower, the recovery of baggage cached at the six-mile stake, the assembly of the iron-framed experimental boat, and an afternoon expedition to a willow-covered island to hunt a brown bear. Yet the three accounts diverge dramatically in tone, detail, and apparent intent.
Three Registers for One Bear Hunt
Gass, whose published 1807 journal was edited for a popular audience, transforms the hunt into mock-heroic theater. His bear is no animal but a sovereign:
In the evening, the most of the corps crossed over to an island, to attack and rout its monarch, a large brown bear, that held possession and seemed to defy all that would attempt to besiege him there. Our troops, however, stormed the place, gave no quarter, and its commander fell.
The diction — “monarch,” “besiege,” “stormed,” “commander,” “no quarter” — frames the corps as a miniature army conducting a siege. Gass (or his editor David McKeehan) supplies narrative shape and a punchline: “Our army returned the same evening to camp without having suffered any loss on their side.”
Lewis, by contrast, writes as a naturalist and field commander. He names the shooter (Drewyer), specifies the range (“about 20 feet”), traces the ball’s path (“through his heart”), and reconstructs the pursuit by blood trail for “about a hundred yards.” He estimates the carcass at 400 pounds and identifies the animal as a young male. Where Gass renders spectacle, Lewis renders evidence.
Clark’s entry is the most compressed. His first version reduces the entire afternoon to two clauses:
we Crossed to a large Island nearly opposit to us to kill bear which has been Seen frequently in the Island, we killed one bear & returned at Sun Set.
His expanded version adds context — that the bear had been sighted the previous evening, that twelve men accompanied the captains — but never approaches Lewis’s procedural detail or Gass’s literary flourish.
What Each Narrator Notices
Beyond the hunt, the entries diverge in what each man considers worth recording. Lewis devotes a long paragraph to a meteorological hypothesis about the persistent southwesterly winds, speculating that air chilled by the snowy mountains “glides down the sides of these mountains & decends to the plains, where by the constant action of the sun on the face of an untimbered country there is a partial vacuum formed for it’s reception.” He then qualifies his own theory: “I am far from giving full credit to my own hypothesis on this subject.” Clark notes only that the wind is “as usial from the S. W. and hard,” and Gass omits the wind entirely.
The captured rat shows the inverse pattern: Lewis and Clark both describe it; Gass does not mention it. The two captains’ descriptions are clearly drawn from shared observation but recorded independently. Lewis offers fuller anatomical detail — “the body and outer part of the legs and head of a light lead colour, the belly and inner side of the legs white” — while Clark’s parallel description is shorter but matches in essentials: “larger ears, long whiskers & toes, with a tail long & hairey like a ground Squirel, verry fine fur and lighter than the Common rat.” Clark’s simile (“like a ground Squirel”) is his own; Lewis does not use it. This is one of the early Corps descriptions of what would later be identified as the bushy-tailed woodrat (Neotoma cinerea).
Patterns of Influence and Independence
The captains’ entries for July 2 show their characteristic relationship: Clark working in close parallel to Lewis but in shorter compass, sometimes producing two drafts of the same day (as here), and occasionally introducing details — like the previous evening’s bear sighting — that Lewis omits. There is no sign that Gass had access to the captains’ journals; his account stands apart in its narrative shaping, suggesting either his own sensibility or his editor’s hand. Notably, Gass alone records the completion of the baggage portage as the men’s emotional milestone, while Lewis frames the same return as a workforce reporting back: “the party returned with the baggage, all well pleased that they had completed the laborious task of the portage.”
Read together, the three entries demonstrate how a single day at the Great Falls produces a scientific essay, a logistical log, and a comic war report — depending on who holds the pen.
