The eighth of July 1805 found the Corps of Discovery still at the Great Falls portage, finishing two parallel projects: Captain Lewis’s iron-framed boat, the Experiment, and Captain Clark’s revised survey of the falls and the Medicine (Sun) River. Three journal-keepers — Lewis, Clark, and Sergeant Patrick Gass — recorded the day, and the differences among their entries illustrate how labor, rank, and temperament shaped the expedition’s documentary record.
One Day, Three Registers
Gass compresses the entire day into a brief paragraph. He logs the hunters’ return (“three buffaloe, a deer and a cabre”), notes a curious cat-like animal and a spotted ground squirrel, and announces the completion of the boat in a single sentence:
We finished the boat this evening, having covered her with tallow and coal-dust. We called her the Experiment, and expect she will answer our purpose.
Gass’s tone is that of a working sergeant: tasks completed, game tallied, project named. His entry is the only one of the three to record the boat’s name, suggesting that “the Experiment” may have been camp shorthand among the enlisted men rather than a designation either captain bothered to write down.
Clark, by contrast, devotes most of his entry to numbers. Having lost his earlier survey notes, he retraces the ground and produces a precise gazetteer of widths:
measured it and found it to be 137 yards wide, in the narrowest part of the Missouri imediately above Medison river the Missouri is 300 yards wide, below and a little above the falls 1440 yards wide… at the handsom falls of 47 ft. 8 I. the river is 473 yards wide, at the lower great falls the river is confined within 280 yards
This is Clark in his element — the cartographer rebuilding a lost data set. He mentions the boat not at all. The hunters’ kill, central to Gass’s day, is reduced to a single closing line.
Lewis’s entry is the longest and most heterogeneous. He summarizes Clark’s reconnaissance (without the measurements), reports on his own application of the boat’s sealing compound, and then turns naturalist for the bulk of the page, devoting extended description to a fox and a ground squirrel the hunting parties brought in.
The Boat, the Fox, and the Squirrel
Only Lewis describes the application of the composition — a mixture of tallow, beeswax, and pulverized charcoal — to the iron-framed boat:
about 12 OCk. the boat was sufficiently dry to receive a coat of the composition which I accordingly applyed. this adds very much to her appearance whether it will be effectual or not. it gives her hull the appearance of being formed of one solid piece.
The hedge — “whether it will be effectual or not” — is telling. Lewis’s pride in the boat’s appearance is shadowed by uncertainty about its function, an uncertainty the next several days would vindicate when the seams leaked and the Experiment was abandoned. Gass, writing without that foreknowledge but also without Lewis’s investment, simply expects she “will answer our purpose.”
The cross-narrator pattern around the small mammals is especially revealing. Gass notes “a small animal almost like a cat, of a light colour” and a ground squirrel “of a more dun colour, and more spotted.” These are the same two creatures Lewis examines at length, but Gass gives them a sentence each. Lewis, recognizing potential new species, devotes a paragraph to the fox alone, distinguishing it from the kit fox by ear size, tail hair, and claw length:
there is sufficient difference for discrimination between it and the kit fox, and to satisfy me perfectly that it is a distinct species.
His description of the ground squirrel — “marked by ranges of pure white circular spots, about the size of a brister blue shot” — is the kind of careful comparative natural history that Jefferson had specifically charged him to produce. Clark records neither animal. The division of labor is explicit: Clark measures the river, Lewis classifies the fauna, and Gass keeps the daily ledger.
A Shared Observation
One detail appears in all three or in two of three entries with near-identical phrasing: the disappearance of the buffalo. Lewis writes that “the immence herds of buffaloe which we had seen for some time past in this neighbourhood have almost entirely disappeared.” Clark echoes this almost verbatim: “the emence herds of buffalow which was near us a fiew days ago, has proceeded on down the river, we Can See but a fiew Bulls in the plains.” The shared phrasing — “emence herds” / “immence herds” — suggests one captain read or heard the other’s wording, a reminder that the journals were not wholly independent documents but were composed in close quarters, with information and even diction circulating between tents.
