A Day in Two Halves
August 24, 1805 produced an unusually bifurcated record because the captains were physically separated. Lewis remained at Camp Fortunate negotiating with the Shoshone band that had arrived the previous day; Clark was returning from his downstream reconnaissance of what he calls simply “the river” — the Salmon. The journals divide cleanly along that geography, and reading them together reconstructs a day no single narrator witnessed in full.
Lewis devotes most of his entry to the horse trade, recording prices with a merchant’s precision: an axe, knife, handkerchief, and “a little paint” per horse, with a shirt and leggings added for the mule. He notes the seller “made a merit of having bestoed me one of his mules,” and concludes
I consider this mule a great acquisition.
Lewis tallies twelve loaded horses and registers a logistical worry that frames everything to come:
it will require at least 25 horses to convey our baggage along such roads as I expect we shall be obliged to pass in the mountains.
Clark, meanwhile, is writing from the other end of a failed scout. He had ridden down the Salmon far enough to confirm it impassable, marked his name on a pine at a creek mouth, and turned back. His entry is the day’s most physically punishing: he slips on a rock and bruises his leg, his bedding gets soaked fording around a cliff, and he subsists on chokecherries and red haws “which act in different ways So as to make us Sick.”
The Wiser Episode, Three Ways
The day’s small medical drama — Peter Wiser’s sudden colic — appears in three journals with revealing differences. Ordway, who was the sergeant left behind with the sick man, gives the barest version: Wiser “was taken of a Sudden with the collick and ditained us.” Whitehouse echoes Ordway almost verbatim (“taken Sick with the collick, and detained us”), continuing the well-documented pattern of Whitehouse copying from Ordway’s field notes — though Whitehouse records six miles to Ordway’s five, a small but characteristic divergence.
Lewis alone supplies the clinical detail: he rode back two miles, found Wiser “very ill with a fit of the cholic,” and administered
a doze of the essence of Peppermint and laudinum which in the course of half an hour so far recovered him that he was enabled to ride my horse.
Lewis also captures a small courtesy lost in the other accounts — an unnamed Indian offered him a horse to ride, which Lewis accepted because it let him better supervise the march. Gass, writing from Clark’s contingent, never mentions Wiser at all; he was twelve miles away and writing about starvation and pine-clad cliffs.
What Each Narrator Preserves Alone
Gass produces the day’s most vivid topography. His description of the Salmon canyon —
The mountains on the sides are not less than 1000 feet high and very steep
— and his blunt summation that going downriver “appeared impracticable” furnish the geographic argument that Clark’s letter to Lewis was meant to convey. Gass also closes with the day’s hungriest sentence: “supperless went to rest for the night.”
Clark alone records the strategic decision-making. His entry lays out two plans in writing — proceed overland by horse to a navigable Columbia tributary, or split the party between river and land — and notes his preference for the first. This is the day the overland route through the Bitterroots becomes the working plan, and Clark is the only narrator who captures that pivot in real time. He also notes, almost wistfully, that he saw “Several trees which would make Small Canoes” below the last Indian camp — a road not taken.
Ordway and Whitehouse, writing from the Lewis camp, preserve a small generosity Lewis omits: “we gave the Indians Some corn, as they had nothing to eat” (Whitehouse). Lewis, focused on acquisition, does not mention the gift. Goodrich’s trout — Lewis identifies him as “our principal fisherman” — appear in Lewis and Ordway but with different counts.
The composite picture is of an expedition whose two halves spent August 24th solving complementary problems: Lewis assembling the means of transport, Clark eliminating an option. They would not compare notes until the following day.
