The journals for July 3, 1805, written from the Great Falls portage camp in present-day Montana, offer an unusually clear demonstration of how the expedition’s three diarists approached the same day with sharply different priorities. Meriwether Lewis writes as the anxious project manager of his experimental iron-frame boat; William Clark records the day’s labor and then drifts into atmospheric speculation; Patrick Gass, freed from boat-building duty, takes a tourist’s holiday to the falls themselves.
The Same Camp, Three Registers
Lewis opens with a managerial inventory of tasks: tar-making, skin-attaching, bark-fitting, hunting for pemmican and hides. His tone quickly turns worried. The tar-kiln has failed to yield, and he confesses a procedural error in the boat’s construction:
I fear I have committed another blunder also in sewing the skins with a nedle which has sharp edges these have cut the skin and as it drys I discover that the throng dose not fill the holes as I expected tho I made them sew with a large throng for that purpose.
Yet within the same entry Lewis swings to optimism, declaring the vessel “extreemly well” shaped and “very light, more so than any vessel of her size that I ever saw.” He even permits himself a flash of humor about the impending loss of buffalo country: “the white puddings will be irretreivably lost and Sharbono out of imployment” — a reference to Toussaint Charbonneau’s prized boudin blanc, recorded by Lewis weeks earlier.
Clark, by contrast, condenses the day’s labor into a single brisk sentence in his field notes: “all of party employd in Sowing the Skins to the boat, burning Tare, preparing timber, hunting buffalow.” His expanded codex entry repeats the same catalog with more detail but conspicuously omits Lewis’s anxieties about the boat. Where Lewis frets, Clark simply reports.
Clark Borrows — and Borrows Heavily
The most revealing cross-narrator pattern lies in the second half of Clark’s expanded entry. The phrasing tracks Lewis’s prose almost verbatim. Lewis writes that the morning’s shower “scarcely wet the grass”; Clark records “a Small Shower at 1 oClock which did Scercely wet the grass.” Lewis notes “six beaver and 2 otter have been killed within the last three days”; Clark writes “Six beaver & 2 orters has been Killed at this camp within a fiew days.” The kill tally — “one buffalow and two Antilopes” — matches Lewis exactly.
This is consistent with the well-documented practice in which Clark expanded his journal by drawing directly on Lewis’s daily entry, sometimes copying whole phrases. What is more unusual is the long meteorological digression that follows, in which Clark proposes a hypothesis about the persistent southwesterly winds:
I think it possible that those almost perpetial S W. winds, proceed from the agency of the Snowey mountains and the wide leavel and untimbered plains which Streach themselves along their borders for an emence distance, that the air comeing in Contact with the Snow is Suddenly chilled and condensed, thus becomeing heavyer than the air beneath in the plains it glides down the Sides of those mountains and decends to the plains.
Clark then qualifies his own theory — “yet I am far from giveing full credit to this hypothesis” — and proposes a falsification test: if winds blow the other direction west of the mountains, the model gains support. A bracketed later note confirms the prediction held. This is Clark in a register he rarely adopts, working as a natural philosopher rather than a cartographer or quartermaster.
What Gass Sees That the Captains Miss
Patrick Gass, the carpenter-sergeant, files a markedly different entry. Excused from the boat work that consumes Lewis and Clark, Gass walks down to the falls he had not yet seen. His prose is plain but observant:
I found the 2nd pitch the most beautiful, though not the highest. About a mile below the upper pitch, the largest and most beautiful spring rises out of the bank of the Missouri on the south side that I ever beheld.
Neither Lewis nor Clark mentions this spring on this date, though Lewis had described comparable features on earlier reconnaissance trips. Gass also reports concrete numbers the captains overlook: seven buffalo killed during his excursion and a pack of “25 wolves in one gang.” Compare this to Lewis’s tally — “One buffaloe only and 2 Antelopes killed today” — and the discrepancy suggests Gass’s hunting party was counted separately, or that the sergeant’s published narrative (edited later by David McKeehan) consolidated kills across days.
Taken together, the three entries show the expedition’s documentary division of labor in microcosm: Lewis the worried engineer and naturalist, Clark the labor accountant and occasional theorist who leans on his co-captain’s prose, and Gass the working soldier whose published account preserves landscape impressions and quantitative details the officers, busy with their failing tar-kiln, simply did not record.
