The journal entries for August 25, 1804 offer an unusually clean test of how the Lewis and Clark narrators divided their attention. While the captains undertook a roughly eighteen-mile round-trip on foot to investigate a conical hill near the mouth of the White Stone (Vermillion) River — a place the local Sioux described as inhabited by malevolent dwarfs — Patrick Gass and Joseph Whitehouse remained with the boat. The result is two narrative streams: an on-the-ground exploration account from Clark and Lewis, and a logistical record of the river party from the men left behind.
The Captains on the Mound
William Clark’s entry is by far the longest of the four and serves as the primary record of the day. He names the hiking party — including Sergeant Ordway, Shields, the Field brothers, Colter, Bratton, Cane, Labiche, Corporal Warfington, Frazer, and his enslaved manservant York — and tracks the march hour by hour. His tone is observational rather than superstitious. Where the Sioux saw spirits, Clark saw ornithology and entomology:
near the top of this nole I observed three holes which I Supposed to be Prarie Wolves or Braroes… I discovered that they wer Cetechig a kind of flying ant which were in great numbers abought the top of this hill, those insects lit on our hats & necks, Several of them bit me verry Shart on the neck
Clark estimates the hill at seventy feet, counts “upwards of 800” buffalo and elk visible from the summit, and notes that Lewis was “much fatigued and verry thursty.” The return route detours to a beaver-dammed stretch of the creek for water, and the entry closes with a connoisseur’s catalogue of wild grapes, blue currants, and two species of plum — including a large yellow variety Clark calls “Deliscously flavoured.” He also records, with characteristic frankness, that York was “nearly exosted with heat thurst and fatigue, he being fat and un accustomed to walk as fast as I went.”
Meriwether Lewis, by contrast, contributes only a fragment — and a telling one. Where Clark documents the social and topographic dimensions of the trip, Lewis files what reads like a naturalist’s footnote:
on our return from the mound of sperits saw the first bats that we had observed since we began to ascend the Missouri also saw on our return on the Creek that passes this mound about 2 M. distant S. a bird of heron kind as large as the Cormorant short tale long leggs of a colour on the back and wings deep copper brown with a shade of red. we could not kill it therefore I can not describe it more particularly.
This division of labor is consistent with the broader pattern of the expedition’s journals: Clark narrates the day; Lewis records the species. The unidentified heron — quite possibly a white-faced ibis in breeding plumage — escapes precisely because Lewis’s standard for description requires a specimen in hand.
The View from the Boat
Patrick Gass and Joseph Whitehouse, both enlisted men keeping journals at the captains’ encouragement, were not on the mound. Gass produces the cleanest summary of the day’s logistics, noting that the captains had not returned by 11 o’clock and that the boat got underway anyway:
At 11 o’clock, the gentlemen not having returned, we set sail with a gentle breeze from the S. E. passed black bluffs on the south side, and continued on nine miles and encamped. Two of our hunters came in who had killed a large elk. Captains Lewis and Clarke did not return this evening.
Gass also frames the spirit-mound story for readers who lack context, explaining that the Sioux “pretend that they will not venture to go, and say that a small people live there, whom they are afraid of” — an editorial gloss the captains themselves do not bother to provide on this date. His mention of catfish weighing “three hundred pounds” together appears to belong to a previous day’s notes carried over.
Whitehouse’s August 25 entry is the most divergent of the four. His text actually describes earlier events — the council with the Oto and Missouria chiefs, where medals and commissions were distributed — and dates the river travel to “Saterday Augs: 4,” suggesting that his journal as transmitted contains misordered or back-filled material. His value here is supplementary: he preserves a detail no other narrator records on this stretch, the Indians’ complaint that
as long as the french had traded with [them] the[y] Never Gave them as much as a Knife for Nothing.
Patterns Across the Four
Read together, the entries demonstrate the expedition’s emerging journal-keeping ecology. Clark functions as the primary chronicler, Lewis as the specialist naturalist, Gass as the plain-spoken summarizer with an eye for what an outside reader needs explained, and Whitehouse as an enlisted-man’s voice whose chronology is sometimes unreliable but whose ear for Native diplomatic speech is sharp. None of the four mentions the spirits with anything resembling belief — but only Gass bothers to explain why the hill mattered to the people who actually lived there.
