The entries of July 19, 1805, capture one of the expedition’s most celebrated geographical discoveries — the limestone canyon Meriwether Lewis would name the Gates of the Rocky Mountains. Yet only one of the three journalists present that day registers the moment with anything resembling awe. Read together, the entries by Lewis, William Clark, and Patrick Gass reveal how sharply expedition narrators could diverge in scale, register, and attention even when describing the same stretch of river.
Lewis the Geologist, Gass the Surveyor
Lewis devotes the bulk of his entry to a sustained description of the canyon walls, working as both naturalist and dramatist. He measures the cliffs at 1,200 feet, traces the river’s passage through them for 5¾ miles, and catalogs the stone — “a black grannite below” giving way above to fragments he reads as “flint of a yelloish brown and light creemcolourd yellow.” The passage culminates in the now-famous coinage:
from the singular appearance of this place I called it the gates of the rocky mountains.
Lewis layers the geological observation with affective language uncharacteristic of his usual reportorial mode. “Every object here wears a dark and gloomy aspect,” he writes, and “the towering and projecting rocks in many places seem ready to tumble on us.” The picturesque vocabulary signals that Lewis recognized this as a set-piece worthy of literary handling.
Patrick Gass, by contrast, compresses the same passage into a few utilitarian lines. He notes mountains “very high, and mostly of solid rock of a light colour,” registers that “the Mountains are so close on the river on both sides that we scarcely could find room to encamp,” and concludes with the day’s mileage: twenty miles, encamped on the south side. Gass offers no name for the place and no aesthetic response. His version is the carpenter-sergeant’s log — distance covered, terrain traversed, ground for the bedroll secured. Where Lewis sees a gate, Gass sees a tight campsite.
Clark on the Overland Route
Clark was not with the boats. His entry records a separate ordeal pursued along an Indian path over two mountains, and his observations diverge accordingly. He notes the same lithic curiosities Lewis would describe — “a Cream Coloured flint which roled down from the Clifts” and cliffs containing “flint a dark grey Stone & a redish brown intermixed” — and he reaches for a geological explanation Lewis does not attempt, suggesting the broken rock “appears to have been broken by Some Convulsion.”
Clark also performs work the other journalists do not: he names features. He christens a creek for Sergeant Pryor — “a butifull Creek on the Std. Side this eveng which meanders thro a butifull Vallie of great extent, I call after Sgt Pryor” — exercising the cartographer’s prerogative even as Lewis, miles downstream, was naming the canyon itself. The two captains were independently inscribing the landscape on the same day.
Clark’s entry closes with one of the more vivid bodily images in the journals:
my feet is verry much brused & cut walking over the flint, & constantly Stuck full Prickley pear thorns, I puled out 17 by the light of the fire to night
Neither Lewis nor Gass mentions the prickly pear that day. The detail belongs entirely to Clark, who throughout the expedition tends to record physical hardship with a directness Lewis often elides.
Shared Weather, Divergent Wildlife
All three narrators converge on a single piece of meteorology: the early-afternoon thunderstorm. Gass records “thunder, lightning and rain, which continued an hour or two”; Lewis notes “a thundershower today about 1 P.M. which continued about an hour and was attended with som hail.” Clark, away from the river party, omits it — a useful reminder that even shared events appear only when each observer was positioned to witness them.
Game reports also split along party lines. Lewis kills an antelope and notes bighorns, beaver, and an otter taken by one of the men with a setting pole. Clark, lacking provisions overland, kills two elk and improvises fuel: “being oblige to Substitute dry buffalow dung in place of wood.” Gass, whose entry is the most condensed, mentions no game at all. The pattern is consistent across the journals: Lewis catalogs fauna as a naturalist, Clark records hunting as commissary, and Gass tends to omit both in favor of distance and terrain.
Taken together, the three entries show how a single day at the threshold of the Rockies generated three incompatible documents — a literary geography, a surveyor’s mileage, and a footsore overland reconnaissance — each indispensable to reconstructing what the expedition actually saw, did, and felt.
