The three journals kept on July 11, 1805 at the Great Falls portage offer a striking study in narrative range. Patrick Gass, William Clark, and Meriwether Lewis all record the same workaday events — the slow arrival of the canoes, the dispatch of Bratton for axes, the killing of buffalo — but Lewis alone pauses to register a sound that none of the others mention, and to weigh it against Indigenous and engagé testimony gathered hundreds of miles back.
Three Registers of the Same Day
Gass, characteristically terse, compresses the entire day into two sentences, noting only that he and three others went out, killed a buffalo, and that the canoes did not return. Clark’s entry is the procedural ledger of a working captain: he timestamps Bratton’s errand (“he returned in about two hours”), tracks Sergeant Pryor’s detail to retrieve buffalo meat, and notes the canoes’ sunset arrival and immediate redeployment. Clark also registers the bodily cost of the portage:
Musquitors verry troublesom, and in addition to their torments we have a Small Knat, which is as disagreeable
Lewis covers the same logistics — Bratton’s whitlow, the staggered canoe arrivals, the wind that pinned the loaded boats eight miles upriver — but his account is markedly fuller, and he attributes the late canoes specifically to “the fear of weting their loads which consisted of articles much more liable to be injured by moisture.” The two captains’ entries clearly draw on shared information (Clark was upriver, Lewis at the lower camp), yet neither simply copies the other; Lewis’s version reads as a synthesis written after consulting Clark’s report.
The Detail Only Lewis Records
What sets Lewis’s entry apart is its expansion outward from the camp. He notes “several very large grey Eagles” and argues, on comparative grounds, that they constitute “a distinct species” from the bald eagle. Then comes the day’s most arresting passage:
this evening a little before the sun set I heared two other discharges of this unaccounable artillery of the Rocky Mountains proceeding from the same quarter that I had before heard it.
Neither Clark nor Gass mentions the sound at all. The omission is itself revealing: Clark, only a few miles upriver, was either out of earshot or — more likely, given Lewis’s phrasing “two other discharges” — did not consider the noise worth logging. Lewis, by contrast, treats the report as an ethnographic puzzle. He recalls that “the Minnetares” had described exactly such mountain thunder, testimony he had earlier dismissed as “the fantom of a supersticious immagination,” and adds that the Pawnees and Arikaras tell the same story of the Black Hills. He then records, without endorsing, the engagés’ explanation:
they state it to be the bursting of the rich mines of silver which these mountains contain.
What the Comparison Reveals
The day exemplifies a pattern visible across the journals: Gass abridges, Clark documents operations, and Lewis reaches for natural-historical and ethnographic significance. Lewis’s willingness to revisit and credit Indigenous information he had previously discounted is notable — the entry is, in effect, a quiet retraction. Having heard the sound himself, he reclassifies Minnetare testimony from superstition to corroborated observation, and aligns it with parallel accounts from two other nations.
The shared details across all three entries — Bratton’s errand, the buffalo retrieval, the canoes’ delay — confirm that the captains conferred or exchanged notes, but the divergences matter more than the overlaps. Clark’s gnats and Lewis’s eagles and mountain artillery would each be lost if only one journal survived. Read together, the three entries show how the expedition’s documentary record depended on the differing attentions of its writers: the carpenter who logged the meat, the captain who logged the work, and the captain who logged the world beyond the camp.
