Voice
William Clark writes like a man with a compass in one hand and a rifle in the other. His sentences are accumulative rather than shapely — clauses pinned together by commas and ampersands, advancing the day mile by mile. A typical entry opens with weather and wind direction, sets out a time of departure, then ticks off bearings, distances, islands, creeks, and game killed before closing with where they camped. The May 15, 1804 entry from Camp River Dubois already shows the template: rain, extinguished fires, wet provisions, men sent to hunt, miles made, a bank of coal observed, fowls purchased from the settlement. The voice is unhurried, additive, faintly bureaucratic, and entirely unsentimental.
His spelling is famously improvisational — "Musquetors," "Misquitors," "Mosquetoes" can all appear in a single week — and he treats orthography as a working tool rather than a finished surface. "Butifull" is perhaps his signature word, applied indiscriminately to praries, plains, bottoms, mornings, and horses. On June 25, 1804 he notes a prairie "which contains great quantities of wild apples of the Size of the Common apple, the French Say is well flavered when ripe"; on April 30, 1805 the country at the Yellowstone confluence simply "have a butifull appearance." The word does almost no aesthetic work — it is a marker that a landscape is open, fertile, and well-watered, the things a surveyor and a future settler would notice.
those Praries has much the appearance from the river of farms, Divided by narrow Strips of woods those Strips of timber grows along the runs which rise on the hill & pass to the river (July 7, 1804)
That is the Clark sensibility in miniature: country read as agricultural prospect, with the topography explained from the inside out.
Omissions
Clark almost never writes about his interior life. Where Lewis erupts into self-reproach on his birthday or rhapsodizes over the Great Falls, Clark records that he is "verry unwell" (July 27, 1805, at Three Forks: "a high fever & akeing in all my bones") and then keeps moving. He took 5 of Rush’s pills, bathed his feet, and pursued the middle fork. The body is a piece of equipment to be maintained. Even on January 4, 1805 at Fort Mandan — "I am verry unwell the after part of the Daye" — the complaint is a single phrase tucked between the weather and a gift of a handkerchief.
He omits, too, the language of awe. The Gates of the Mountains (July 16, 1805) get a paragraph about the river’s width, the box elder and choke cherry on its edges, and the "hard black rock" facing the range — but no transport. The Pacific is reached almost without comment in his hand; the great drama of November 1805 is the practical question of where to winter, decided by vote and recorded as logistics. Religion, providence, and abstract reflection are essentially absent. So is gossip about Lewis. Even on December 5, 1805, when he confesses that Lewis’s "long delay below has been the cause of no little uneasiness on my part for him, a 1000 conjectures has crouded into my mind," the admission is brief and immediately resolved by Lewis’s actual return.
He also writes very little about Sacagawea as a person — she is "the Squar," "the Indian woman," "the Squar wife to Shabono." But he notices what she does: she finds him a currant-like bush in bloom on April 30, 1805; she gathers "Year-pah" roots for the Rocky Mountain crossing on May 18, 1806; she brings him "a large and well flavoured Goose berry" on August 9, 1806. The omissions are of feeling; the observations of utility are meticulous.
Patterns
Several recurring habits structure Clark’s prose across 806 entries.
Courses and distances. Especially in 1804, his entries read like a surveyor’s field book: "Course N 57° W to a pt. on S. Sd. 5 ms." (June 5, 1804); "N 70°W 1/2 me. along the right Side of a Willow Isd" (June 25, 1804). He numbers landmarks parenthetically — (1), (2), (3) — as if cross-referencing a chart he is simultaneously drawing. This is the working notebook of the man who would produce the expedition’s master map.
Naming. Clark names creeks compulsively, and almost always for incident or appearance: "Indian Knob Creek" because a Missouri Indian was met there (July 28, 1804); "turf Creek from the number of bogs" (August 7, 1805); "the Creek of the 3 Sisters" (September 22, 1804); "Stone Idol Creek" for an Arikara holy stone (October 13, 1804). The names are mnemonic, not poetic.
Game tally. Almost every entry ends with kills: "Three mule deer, two Buffalow & 5 beaver killed, 3 of the mountain ram Seen" (May 10, 1805). On February 13, 1805 he summarizes a hunting trip with bookkeeping precision: "the hunters killed an Elk, Buffalow Bull & 5 Deer. all Meager… 9 Elk, 18 Deer." Hunger and abundance are measured in carcasses.
Weather and river. Wind direction and river rise/fall are recorded with the regularity of a tide gauge. "river fall a little" (July 7, 1804); "river rise a little to day" (March 6, 1805); "river fall 11/2 inch" (November 25, 1804). It is the discipline of a man whose life depended on reading water.
Indigenous people as informants and economic actors. Clark is consistently practical about Native nations: who has horses, who is at war with whom, who has been "riducd by the Saukees" (June 15, 1804), what a horse costs in pistols, balls, powder, and knives (August 29, 1805), who can guide and who will trade. He records political history matter-of-factly — the Little Osage and Missouria villages, the Mandan-Hidatsa towns, the Yankton at Calumet Bluff. He paid "particular attention which pleased them verry much" (November 25, 1804) when interpreters were absent. The respect is functional and diplomatic; the curiosity, when it surfaces, is ethnographic — the underground sweat lodge on October 11, 1805, the Skaddatt gambling game on April 18, 1806, the willow fish-trap on May 8, 1806.
Patterns of Change Across the Arc
Clark’s prose loosens and lengthens as the journey proceeds. The 1804 Missouri entries are dominated by courses — N 57° W, S 49° W — and parenthetical landmark numbers; they read like a chainman’s notes. By Fort Mandan (winter 1804–05) the entries become domestic and observational: huts, dabbing, the eclipse of January 15, 1805 timed to the second, Christmas taffia and three cannon, fleas in the blankets. He has time, and the writing slows.
On the Missouri above Fort Mandan in spring 1805 he becomes a naturalist almost by osmosis from Lewis: he describes the currant-like bush Sacagawea brings him (April 30, 1805), the choke cherries and yellow currants on the bottoms (June 25, 1805), the "Spcie of Shomake" in the Gates of the Mountains (July 16, 1805). The bearings persist but they share the page with botany and weather.
At Fort Clatsop (winter 1805–06) something striking happens: long passages in Clark’s journal are virtually identical to Lewis’s. The detailed taxonomy of fir species on February 5, 1806, the anatomical drawing and description of the eulachon on February 25, 1806, the careful account of the "deep purple berry" on January 26, 1806 — these are clearly shared text, with Clark copying or paraphrasing Lewis. His own voice surfaces in the practical complaints: the fleas (December 26, 1805), wet powder, Bratten’s pain treated with "volatile linniment… Sperits of wine, camphire, Sastile Soap, and a little laudinum" (March 7, 1806).
On the homeward leg, especially after the party divides on July 3, 1806 and Clark descends the Yellowstone, his voice returns in full force — confident, terse, geographic. The descent is measured in shoals, gravels, grit fit for whetstones, and bull buffalo that swim across to die (July 18, 1806). By August 1806 he is making seventy or eighty miles a day and recording it with the brevity of a man eager to be home.
Comparisons
Set beside Lewis, Clark is the camera and Lewis is the essayist. Lewis specifies, theorizes, and confesses; Clark counts, names, and proceeds. When the two journals overlap word-for-word — as on much of the Fort Clatsop natural history — it is almost always Clark borrowing from Lewis, not the reverse. Clark’s original prose, by contrast, is leaner and more operational: "we Set out at 7 oClock after a hard rain & Wind" (May 26, 1804) is his characteristic opening, where Lewis would more likely begin with a reflection or a bird.
Set beside the sergeants — Ordway, Gass, Floyd — Clark is broader and more analytical. Ordway is a diligent log; Clark is a log plus a map plus a diplomatic record plus, occasionally, a botanical notebook. He is also the expedition’s chief medical officer in his journal, dosing Rush’s pills, applying flannel and laudanum, sweating the sick Nez Perce chief (May 28, 1806).
What ultimately distinguishes Clark’s voice is a kind of cheerful stoicism. He walks thirty miles on ice with blistered feet (February 13, 1805), is thrown from no horse but watches Charbonneau pitch off one (July 18, 1806), eats dog without complaint, sleeps in the rain. The closing line of the December 25, 1805 entry — "the men merrily Disposed, I give them all a little Taffia and permited 3 Cannon fired… the frolick ended &c." — captures him exactly: the commander noting the holiday, allowing the noise, and ending with an &c. because there is more to do tomorrow.
