The June 12, 1805 record is unusual because it documents two simultaneous expeditions. Lewis, recovering from illness, is walking overland with an advance party west of the Missouri; Clark, Gass, Ordway, and Whitehouse remain with the boats ascending the south fork above the Marias decision point. The journals do not overlap — they complement. Read together, they preserve a day in which the expedition’s geography and its narrative voice both pulled apart.
Lewis Alone on the High Plain
Lewis’s entry is the longest and the most lyrical of the day. Restored by his decoction of choke-cherry twigs, he set out at sunrise and bore southwest across the level plain. By his own count he marched roughly twenty-seven miles, killed two grizzlies at a single fire —
“we met with two large bear, and killed them boath at the first fire, a circumstance which I beleive has never happend with the party in killing the brown bear before”
— and ascended a ridge from which he saw the Rocky Mountains in full for the first time on the journey. His description carries an unusual aesthetic register:
“this was an august spectacle and still rendered more formidable by the recollection that we had them to pass.”
None of the other narrators records this sighting, because none of them saw it. Lewis also notes burrowing squirrels, wolves, mule deer, immense buffalo herds, and — at evening camp — catching more than a dozen white fish on deer melt offered by Goodrich. The entry is observational, scientific, and quietly self-aware about his fatigue.
The Boat Party: Snakes, Current, and a Sick Woman
Clark, Ordway, Gass, and Whitehouse describe a different day entirely. Gass, characteristically brief, is actually writing about the previous day’s cache work at the Marias — burying roughly a thousand pounds of corn, pork, flour, powder, and lead — and barely registers June 12 itself. Ordway and Whitehouse, by contrast, give nearly identical accounts of the boats’ departure from “point Deposit” at 7 o’clock, the figure of 2508¼ miles from the Missouri’s mouth, the five or six islands passed before losing sight of the point, the pennyroyal found on stony banks, and the rattlesnake incident.
The Ordway-Whitehouse parallel is so close it confirms the documented pattern of Whitehouse copying from Ordway. Compare Ordway’s
“one man took hold of one which was in a bunch of bushes as he was taking along the towing line, but luckley escaped being bit”
with Whitehouse’s
“one man took hold of one with his hand, which was in a bunch of bushes, but luckily he escaped being bit.”
Clark independently corroborates the encounter —
“one of the men cought one by the head in Catch’g hold of a bush on which his head lay reclined”
— which suggests the incident genuinely happened and was not merely transmitted. The mileage figures diverge oddly: Ordway gives 18 miles, Whitehouse 78. The latter is almost certainly a transcription error.
What Only Clark Preserves
Clark is the day’s medical chronicler. He alone records moving Sacagawea — “the interpreters wife” — out of the hot bottom of the pirogue and into the cooler covered section, and he alone notes administering medicine. He also catalogs two further ailments: a man with a felon rising on his hand, another with toothache and a cold in the jaw. Ordway and Whitehouse note only that the interpreter’s wife is “verry Sick.” Lewis, walking miles to the southwest, does not know.
This silence is itself significant. The illness that would nearly kill Sacagawea over the following days is, on June 12, a fact known fully only to Clark. Lewis’s journal — eloquent on grizzlies and snowy ranges — is a document written from outside the medical crisis unfolding in the boats. The cross-narrator record on this date is therefore a study in informational asymmetry: the captain who saw the Rockies first did not yet know that the woman whose linguistic skills would soon be essential was deteriorating at river level behind him.
