The entries of July 21, 1805 offer an unusually clear demonstration of how the Lewis and Clark expedition’s three principal diarists of this stretch — Meriwether Lewis, William Clark, and Sergeant Patrick Gass — distributed observational labor across the Corps. On this date, the party was emerging from the rugged country above the Great Falls into a broad valley flanked by snow-tipped ranges. Lewis traveled with the canoes; Clark was ahead on foot, his feet badly cut from prickly pear; Gass, like Lewis, was on the water. The result is a triangulated record in which each narrator’s register and angle of view differ markedly.
Lewis the Naturalist, Gass the Logbook
Lewis devotes the bulk of his entry to natural history. He notes the molting swans (“like the geese have not yet recovered the feathers of the wing and could not fly”), describes sandhill cranes whose young are “as large as a turkey and cannot fly,” and contrasts the lofty green river-bottom grass with hillside grass “perfectly dry and appears to be scorched by the heat of the sun.” His account of the valley’s opening is one of the more lyrical landscape passages in his journals:
the river entered a beautifull and extensive plain country of about 10 or 12 miles wide which extended upwards further that the eye could reach this valley is bounded by two nearly parallel ranges of high mountains which have their summits partially covered with snow.
Gass, by contrast, compresses the same day into a terse paragraph of navigational facts: hills, red-purple rocks, two small creeks, a wind shift, a narrow ridge, a cluster of islands, 15½ miles, a deer killed. Where Lewis names Pryor’s Creek for Sergeant John Pryor and measures it at 28 yards wide, Gass mentions “two small creeks one on each side” without naming either. The pattern is consistent with Gass’s role throughout this leg of the journey: a sergeant’s running log of distances, encampments, and game, intended as a working record rather than a descriptive treatment.
Clark Off the River
Clark’s entry stands apart because he was not with the boats. His opening line — “our feet So brused and Cut that I deturmined to delay for the Canoes” — situates him on a small detached hunting party scouting ahead. Where Lewis sees the valley from the water as it opens before the canoes, Clark is already in it, looking back and across. He generalizes the geography from his higher vantage:
all the Creeks which fall into the Missouri on the Std. Side Since entering the Mountains have extencive Valies of open Plain. the river bottoms Contain nothing larger than a Srub untill above the last Creek.
Clark also catalogs the day’s botany in a way Lewis does not on this date: “emence quantities of Sarvice buries, yellow, red, Purple & black Currents ripe and Superior to any I ever tasted particularly the yellow & purple kind. Choke Cheries are Plenty.” This is the only ripe-fruit inventory among the three entries, and it complements rather than duplicates Lewis’s faunal observations. Clark records mosquitoes and gnats as “verry troublesom”; neither Lewis nor Gass mentions insects on this day.
Convergences and Quiet Disagreements
All three narrators agree on the broad shape of the day: a hard west wind, a river crowded with islands, a strong current, and an encampment on a fine bottom. Lewis and Gass both describe the islands explicitly; Clark notes the river “Crouded with little Islands and Cose graveley bars.” The hunting tally also lines up loosely — Gass reports one deer killed, Lewis confirms “we killed one deer today,” and Clark, separately, records “I killed a Buck, and J. Fields killed a Buck and Doe this evening,” suggesting the detached party’s game was logged independently of the main party’s.
One subtle divergence concerns the snow on the surrounding peaks. Lewis describes summits “partially covered with snow” with pine “below the snowey region.” Clark qualifies more carefully: “I observe on the highest pinicals of Some of the mountains to the West Snow lying in Spots Some Still further North are covered with Snow and cant be Seen from this point.” Clark, on foot and likely at higher elevation, distinguishes between snow he can see and snow he infers — a precision Lewis’s water-level view does not require.
Read together, the three entries illustrate the expedition’s documentary division of labor: Lewis the descriptive naturalist, Clark the geographer-hunter ranging ahead, Gass the steady mileage-keeper. Each narrator, on this single Sunday, supplies what the others omit.
