The June 18 entries reveal a captain-level division of labor that fractures the journal record along geographic lines. Lewis remains at the lower portage camp supervising the cache, the wagons, and the iron boat frame; Clark is upriver measuring cataracts and counting buffalo. The four enlisted-and-officer narrators at camp (Lewis, Gass, Ordway, Whitehouse) produce nearly identical accounts of the day’s domestic labor, while Clark alone preserves the day’s drama and topography.
The Camp Chorus
Ordway, Whitehouse, and Gass record the same sequence of events in language so similar that the Whitehouse-from-Ordway copying pattern is again visible. Compare Ordway’s phrasing on the wagons —
the little low waggons compleated. all made of wood & of a ordinary quallity though they may answer the purpose
— with Whitehouse’s:
the low waggons finished which are all made of wood, & of an ordinarry quality though they may answer the purpose.
Gass independently echoes the same skeptical assessment:
made altogether of wood, and of a very ordinary quality; but it is expected they will answer the purpose.
The shared verdict — “ordinary quality,” “may answer the purpose” — registers a collective unease about equipment the men themselves had just built. Three narrators do not usually agree this precisely on adjectives unless the judgment was being voiced openly around camp, or unless one is copying another.
Lewis’s version of the same scene is more technical and forward-looking. Where the sergeants describe the wagons as finished, Lewis qualifies: they will serve
if the axetrees prove sufficiently strong.
He alone inspects the iron boat frame and notes a single missing screw that
the ingenuity of Sheilds can readily replace, a resource which we have very frequent occasion for
— a small but telling acknowledgment of how often the expedition depended on the blacksmith. Lewis also alone records his anxiety about hide supply: with ten deer and no elk killed, he begins
to fear that we shall have some difficulty in procuring skins for the boat.
Clark Alone Upriver
Clark’s entry is the day’s outlier in every dimension — length, content, register. He is the only narrator who saw the second great cataract, and his measurements (47 feet 8 inches perpendicular fall, river 473 yards wide) constitute the day’s surveying record. His aesthetic response is uncharacteristically effusive:
this is one of the grandest views in nature and by far exceeds any thing I ever Saw.
He then describes the Giant Springs in terms equally superlative —
the largest fountain or Spring I ever Saw, and doubt if it is not the largest in America Known
— water that
keeps its Colour for 1/2 a mile which is emencely Clear and of a bluish Cast.
The Willard bear incident at the close of Clark’s entry exists nowhere else in the day’s record. Willard, sent 170 yards for meat, was chased by a white bear within 40 yards of camp; Clark gathered three men and pursued. The camp narrators, miles downriver, knew nothing of it. This is a useful reminder that the expedition’s daily “record” is a composite: events on a single calendar date occurred in two separated parties, and only the captains’ geographic mobility produces the full picture.
What Each Narrator Uniquely Preserves
Ordway alone gives the cumulative mileage figure —
we are now 2580J miles from the mouth of the Missourie River
— a running total he tends to maintain more faithfully than the others. Ordway and Whitehouse both note the high west wind; Lewis explains it, observing that in
this open country where there is not a tree to brake or oppose their force
such gales are routine. Lewis alone tracks Sacagawea’s recovery in clinical detail, noting she
set up the greater part of the day and walked out for the fist time since she arrived here
and recording the addition of fifteen drops of oil of vitriol to her regimen. Ordway notes only that the “Intrepters wife” is “some what better.”
Lewis closes with two natural-history digressions absent from every other entry: a description of a thornless red gooseberry with a “sweetish and pinelike tast, not agreeable to me,” and a note on the “immence quantities of small grasshoppers of a brown colour” whose grazing pressure, he speculates, helps keep the plains grass cropped low. The botanical and ecological observations — like Clark’s measurements — survive only because one captain made room for them in a day otherwise consumed by labor.
