The journal entries from June 23, 1805 capture the Great Falls Portage at a moment when the Corps of Discovery was split between two camps and engaged in two very different undertakings: hauling canoes and baggage across eighteen miles of prairie, and assembling the experimental iron-framed boat at the upper camp. The three surviving accounts — by William Clark, Patrick Gass, and Joseph Whitehouse — illustrate how narrators positioned at different points in the operation produced strikingly different documents of the same day.
Clark the Surveyor, Clark the Witness
Clark’s entry is by far the longest and most technically detailed. Having spent the previous day laying out the portage route, he returns to the lower camp on the 23rd, straightening the path as he goes and measuring it precisely. He records the total distance as “17 miles 3/4 to the river & 1/2 a mile up i.e 18 1/4 miles portage,” and itemizes the segments: 286 poles to the first creek, six miles to Willow Run, eleven miles thence to the White Bear Islands. He notes the terrain — a steep quarter-mile ascent, gullies, the heads of several short ravines — with the eye of a man responsible for moving heavy canoes over it.
But Clark’s entry is not merely cartographic. It contains one of the most affecting passages in his journals concerning the men’s suffering:
the men has to haul with all their Strength wate & art, maney times every man all catching the grass & knobes & Stones with their hands to give them more force in drawing on the Canoes & Loads, and notwithstanding the Coolness of the air in high presperation and every halt, those not employed in reparing the Couse; are asleep in a moment, maney limping from the Soreness of their feet Some become fant for a fiew moments, but no man Complains all go Chearfully on
He acknowledges that “to State the fatigues of this party would take up more of the journal than other notes which I find Scercely time to Set down.” The detail about doubled moccasin soles — added against the prickly pear and ground churned hard and uneven by buffalo — appears only in Clark’s account.
Gass at the Upper Camp: The Iron Boat Begins
Patrick Gass, by contrast, is one of the three men who remained at the upper camp with Lewis. His entry opens with a topographical observation absent from the others — that above the falls “the river is wide and the current gentle,” with three small islands and cottonwood-and-willow banks giving way to plains and distant snow-covered mountains. Gass then turns to the day’s central task at the upper camp:
The iron boat-frame is to be covered with skins and requires a quantity of thin shaved strips of wood for lining. In the forenoon we put the frame together, which is 36 feet long, 4 1-2 wide, and 2 feet 2 inches deep.
Gass, a carpenter by trade, gives dimensions and construction logic that neither Clark (absent from the upper camp) nor Whitehouse (focused on news arriving from elsewhere) records. He also notes that Lewis walked two miles down to Medicine River in the afternoon to check on the hunters, finding and camping with one of them overnight.
Whitehouse the Synthesizer
Joseph Whitehouse occupies a middle position. He is at the upper camp early in the day but travels back with Clark’s party in the evening, and his entry accordingly braids together intelligence from both locations. He is the only narrator to specify the hunters’ tally — “16 buffalow and a fiew Deer but Saw no Elk” — and the only one to record that George Shannon had separated from the hunting party with “a Small kittle & Some parched meal.” Whitehouse also reports the surveying work in summary form:
Cap! Clark Surveyed & measured the remainder of the portage, and looked out the best way for the truck waggons & baggage to Go, and made the distance to the upper camp to where we take water again to be 18 miles a Strait course. they put up mile half mile 4 mile & a half quarty mile Stakes as well as Several flags as guides for the portage
The detail about mile, half-mile, and quarter-mile stakes and flags is unique to Whitehouse; Clark mentions only that the route was “Staked out and measured.” Whitehouse’s register is consistently the most condensed of the three — neither technical like Gass nor sustained like Clark — but his habit of harvesting facts from multiple conversations makes his entry indispensable for reconstructing what each detachment was doing.
Patterns Across the Three Accounts
The three entries do not appear to copy one another. Clark and Whitehouse traveled together part of the day yet diverge sharply in emphasis: Clark fixates on terrain and the men’s endurance, Whitehouse on news and numbers. Gass, isolated at the upper camp, supplies the only carpenter’s-eye view of the iron boat’s assembly. Together the accounts show how the expedition’s documentary record depended on the simultaneous presence of narrators at separated work sites — and how Clark’s willingness to admit that the fatigues exceeded what he had “time to Set down” is itself among the most candid acknowledgments of the journals’ limits.
