The journal entries of July 17, 1805, written as the expedition pushed through the canyon Lewis had named the Gates of the Mountains, offer an unusually clean demonstration of how three of the corps’s narrators divided observational labor. Patrick Gass, Meriwether Lewis, and William Clark all describe the same stretch of the Missouri on the same day, yet a reader unfamiliar with the geography would be hard-pressed to recognize that the three accounts share a setting. Each narrator writes in a register shaped by his role and his audience.
Lewis the Naturalist, Clark the Surveyor
Lewis devotes his entry almost entirely to botany. He opens with the sunflower and the Indigenous foodways built around its seed, noting that the Missouri peoples “most commonly first parch the seed and then pound them between two smooth stones until) they reduce it to a fine meal,” sometimes mixing the meal with marrow grease to form a dough. He confesses he has “eat it in that state heartily and think it a pallateable dish.” From there he moves to a Linnaean description of the yellow currant, cataloguing the perianth, corolla, stamens, pistil, and stigma in technical detail:
the corolla is monopetallous funnel-shaped; very long, superior, withering and of a fine orrange colour. five stamens and one pistillum; of the first, the fillaments are capillare, inserted into the corolla, equal, and converging; the anther ovate, biffid and incumbent.
Lewis is composing a contribution to natural science. The river itself is virtually absent from his entry — no rapids, no mileage, no encampment.
Clark’s entry, by contrast, is the day’s geographical record. He notes crossing “the rapid at the Island Cald pine rapid with Some dificuelty,” then logs the celestial work performed when the two parties met: a meridian altitude and “Some Luner Observations.” His latitude reading — 46° 42′ 14″ 7/10 N — is the kind of datum no other narrator on the expedition consistently produced. Clark also captures the cramped topography that forced the men “to pass & repass the river from one point to another,” and he registers the channel width (“from 70 to 120 yards”) with surveyor’s precision. Where Lewis sees a flora, Clark sees a corridor.
Gass and the Labor of the Day
Gass, the carpenter-sergeant, occupies a third position. His entry is neither botanical treatise nor navigational log but a workman’s account of what the day required. He records that the parties combined crews to ascend the rapids: “We had here to join the crews of two canoes together, to go up the rapids which were about half a mile long.” This logistical detail — that the rapid demanded doubled manpower — appears in neither Lewis nor Clark, although Clark alludes obliquely to the difficulty. Gass also offers the day’s most vivid landscape sentence, describing “a very desert looking part of the country” with peaks he estimates at “700 (perhaps some nearly 1200) feet high, all rock,” on which the men nonetheless saw mountain sheep.
Gass’s published narrative, prepared later from his field notes, tends toward this kind of plainspoken summary. His mileage figure (“We went 11 miles and encamped in a small bottom on the north side”) is also noteworthy: Clark gives “about 8 miles” and camps on the “Stard Side” (starboard, i.e., the right bank ascending, which is the north side here). The discrepancy is small but real, and it is the sort of variance that recurs across the journals when daily distances were estimated rather than measured.
Points of Convergence
Where the three narrators do overlap, the convergences are revealing. Both Lewis and Clark remark on the ripening currants. Lewis treats them taxonomically; Clark simply notes, “The yellow Current now ripe also the fussey red Choke Cheries getting ripe Purple Current are also ripe.” Clark’s shorter list confirms the same species Lewis is dissecting at length, suggesting the two captains had likely discussed the fruit during the day’s rendezvous at the rapid. Mountain sheep appear in both Gass (“we saw mountain sheep on the very tops of them”) and Clark (“Saw Several Ibex or mountain rams to day”), but Lewis — absorbed in his herbarium — does not mention them.
Read together, the three entries function almost as a coordinated record only by accident: Lewis supplies the natural history, Clark the cartography and astronomy, Gass the human labor and the landscape’s felt scale. None of the three is redundant, and none could substitute for the others. The day at the pine rapid is a useful reminder that the expedition’s documentary value depends on reading its narrators in concert rather than choosing among them.
