June 20, 1805 finds the Corps split between two purposes at the Great Falls of the Missouri. Lewis waits at the lower camp with the main party, hunting and drying meat in anticipation of the portage. Clark, returning that evening, brings back the surveyed measurements of the cataracts and a recommended overland route. The five narrators converge on the survey numbers but each preserves a distinct slice of the day’s significance.
The Survey Numbers and How They Traveled
Clark’s field notes — which Lewis records receiving directly (“Capt. Clark now furnished me with the field notes of the survey”) — became the day’s central piece of intelligence. The sergeants’ journals show how that intelligence propagated through camp by oral report. Ordway logs the falls as “87 feet perpinticular,” then “47 feet 8 Inch,” then “about 30 or upwards,” with the total portage at “17 miles to where we can take water again.” Whitehouse, writing in close parallel, gives “the first to be about 30 feet the highest or middle 87 feet the upper one a 45 feet.” The near-identical phrasing and shared idiosyncrasies (“perpinticular,” “verry fat,” the buffalo count of eleven) again point to the documented Whitehouse-from-Ordway dependency, though Whitehouse mis-orders the falls and rounds the second figure.
Gass, by contrast, compresses the entire survey into a single sentence — “Captain Clarke and his party returned, having found a tolerable good road except where some draughts crossed it” — and skips the numbers altogether. Gass, the carpenter-sergeant, registers what bears on labor: the road is passable, the gear is cached ahead, the work can begin.
The Great Spring, the Bear, and What Each Narrator Kept
Ordway and Whitehouse alone preserve the day’s most striking landscape detail — the spring above the falls of 47 feet 8 inches:
the largest fountan or Spring falls in that we ever Saw before and it is the oppinion of Capt Clark that it is the largest Spring in america known, this water boils up from under the rocks near the River & falls immediately in to the river 8 feet & keeps its colour for a mile, which is verry clear and of a blueish cast
Neither captain mentions the spring in his June 20 entry, though Lewis would later describe it himself. Ordway and Whitehouse also carry the only surviving account of the white bear that nearly took Willard on the island — Clark’s own entry, surprisingly, omits the encounter entirely, even though he led the relief party. The sergeants thus serve as the redundant-storage layer of the expedition’s memory: details the captains drop into private conversation get caught and recorded downstream.
What Only the Captains Wrote
Lewis alone notes Sacagawea’s recovery — “qute free from pain and fever this morning… she has been walking about and fishing” — a continuation of the medical thread he has carried for days. He also turns naturalist on the buffalo’s preference for the mineral seeps over the river, an observation entirely absent from the sergeants’ meat-focused reports of the same animals.
Clark’s entry contains the day’s most consequential passage, and it appears in no other journal:
we have Conceived our party Sufficiently Small, and therefore have Concluded not to dispatch a Canoe with a part of our men to St. Louis as we have intended early in the Spring… we have never hinted to any one of the party that we had Such a Scheem in contemplation, and all appear perfectly to have made up their minds, to Succeed in the expedition or perish in the attempt.
The captains have quietly abandoned the planned detachment that would have carried dispatches back down the Missouri. The sergeants record buffalo counts and waterfall heights; Clark records a strategic reversal the men do not yet know has been made. The asymmetry is characteristic — command-level decisions surface in the captains’ journals weeks or months before, if ever, they reach the rank-and-file record.
Clark closes with a meteorological observation that matches Lewis’s prose so closely the two entries appear to have been drafted in collaboration: localized storms on the plains discharging hail, rain, and snow within a few miles, and the persistent snow on the northwestern peaks that has not diminished since first sighting. It is a reminder that the captains’ journals, while distinct in voice, were written in the same tent on the same evening, often from shared notes — and that the sergeants, writing separately, preserve the parts of the day that conversation rather than dictation carried into the record.
