By late June 1805, the expedition was strung out along the eighteen-mile portage around the Great Falls of the Missouri. The four journals surviving from June 28 fall into two clear groups: Lewis and Gass write from the upper camp, where the iron-frame boat Experiment was being skinned and sewn; Clark and Whitehouse write from the lower camp and the river, where the last of the baggage was being dragged up the bluff. Read together, the entries reconstruct a single day in two places.
Upper Camp: Skins, Bark, and White Bears
Lewis offers the day’s most detailed account, opening with a roll-call of assignments that reads almost like a foreman’s logbook:
Set Drewyer to shaving the Elk skins, Fields to make the cross stays for the boat, Frazier and Whitehouse continue their operation with the skins, Shields and Gass finish the horizontal bars of the sections; after which I sent them in surch of willow bark.
Gass, normally a fuller narrator, here contributes only a fragment — but it independently confirms Lewis’s picture of collective labor:
now at this camp, but all busy about the boat; some shaving skins, some sewing them together; and some preparing the wood part.
The phrasing is Gass’s own, not copied from Lewis, yet the division of tasks aligns precisely. This is one of the cleaner instances in which Gass’s brevity corroborates rather than echoes the captain.
Lewis alone records the improvisation forced by a shortage of elk hides:
not having quite Elk skins enough I employed three buffaloe hides to cover one section. not being able to shave these skins I had them singed pretty closely with a blazeing torch; I think they will answer tolerable well.
This detail — small, technical, and consequential for the boat’s later failure — appears nowhere else in the day’s record.
Lewis also devotes an unusual amount of space to the grizzlies prowling the camp. He notes that the men sleep with their arms beside them and that the dog — almost certainly Seaman —
keeps constantly padroling all night.
The threat is real enough that he refuses to send any man alone on an errand, but his tone shifts toward bravado when he proposes to
make a frolick of it when the party return and drive them from these islands.
No other narrator on this date mentions the bears.
Lower Camp and River: Crimson Water and a Dram at Dark
Clark’s and Lewis’s accounts of the lower-camp work converge so closely that Lewis is plainly summarizing Clark’s report — Lewis was not present for these events. Compare Clark’s own words:
passed the Creek which had rose a little and the water nearly red, and bad tasted
with Lewis’s secondhand version:
portage creek had arisen considerably and the water was of crimson colour and illy tasted.
The substance is identical; Lewis’s diction (“crimson,” “illy tasted”) is more literary, while Clark’s is plainer and includes the practical observation that the rise was slight. This is a useful reminder that Lewis’s journal for this date is partly a compilation, not a single eyewitness record.
Clark closes with the day’s most human moment: after a hard shower and a violent wind off the snow mountains,
I refreshed them with a dram.
Lewis renders the same gesture more formally as
he administered the consolation of a dram to each
— register difference rather than factual divergence.
Whitehouse on the River
Whitehouse, traveling upriver with the advance canoe party that had set out under Clark’s earlier orders toward the Three Forks, writes from a third vantage entirely. His entry is the day’s most observational, attentive to landscape in a way the captains, busy with logistics, are not:
livel Smoth large plains, on each Side. high grass in places & fine Short grass in general. considerable of good flax now going to Seed. the thissels also pleanty & high now in blossom.
He also reports the mosquitoes —
I cannot keep them out of my face at this time
— a complaint absent from Lewis and Clark, who were sheltered at the portage camps. Whitehouse confirms the hunter’s return with deer, the rapid current, and a day’s run of twenty-four miles, ending with the candid admission that
the party in general much fatigued.
Read across all four narrators, June 28 is a day of dispersed effort: Lewis improvising with singed buffalo hide, Clark coaxing wagons up a bluff through red water, Gass sewing skins, and Whitehouse pushing through mosquito-thick bottoms toward the mountains still ahead. No single journal captures the day; only the composite does.
