The 22nd of June, 1805 found the Corps of Discovery midway through the grueling Great Falls portage, an eighteen-mile haul around the Missouri’s cascades that would consume nearly a month of the expedition’s progress. Two enlisted journalists, Private Joseph Whitehouse and Sergeant Patrick Gass, recorded the day’s labor — but their entries diverge so sharply in scope and emphasis that they read almost as accounts of different events. Read together, they reveal how rank, temperament, and narrative habit shaped the expedition’s documentary record.
Two Registers, One Wagon
Gass, the carpenter-sergeant promoted after Sergeant Floyd’s death, writes with the terseness of a man whose mind is on tools and timber. His entire entry orbits a single mechanical failure:
We went on slowly as our axletrees were weak; and about 12 o’clock one of them broke; when we had to halt and put in a new one. This accident happened at a draught where there was some willow, and we put in an axletree of that; which I believe is the best this country affords for the purpose.
The detail is characteristic of Gass: a problem identified, a field repair improvised, a craftsman’s verdict delivered on the suitability of local willow. Readers of his journal across the portage weeks come to expect this register — the practical assessment of materials, the matter-of-fact reckoning of hours lost. He notes only that it was “late in the evening” before the party reached the upper camp.
Whitehouse, by contrast, opens with weather (“a fair pleasant morning. the wind as usal”) and quickly widens his lens beyond the wagon party. He tracks the captains’ division of labor — Lewis pushing ahead with three or four men to ready the iron-frame boat at the upper camp, Clark superintending the haul — in a way Gass does not bother to record. Notably, Whitehouse says nothing of the broken axletree. Either the news did not reach the lower camp where he remained, or he judged it unworthy of mention beside the spectacle unfolding at the falls.
What Whitehouse Sees That Gass Does Not
The most arresting passage in either journal belongs to Whitehouse, and it comes secondhand from Clark:
Cap! Clark informed us that he Saw 40 or 50 Swimming the River ab! the falls and Some went down over them which he could not See them rise any more. a nomber got to Shore half drowned. in this way great numbers of those animels are lost and accounts for So many as we Saw lying on the Shores below the falls ever Since we came from the Mandans & Grossvauntares.
Whitehouse here does something Gass almost never does: he reasons backward across hundreds of river miles to explain a phenomenon the expedition had been observing for weeks. The rotting buffalo carcasses noted along the lower Missouri, he infers from Clark’s report, are the casualties of mass drownings at the falls upstream. It is a small but genuine piece of natural-historical thinking, and it sits beside a domestic vignette — “Cap! Clarks Servant york killed one which was verry fat” — that records York’s hunting contribution with the same neutral notation given any other member of the party.
Gass, focused on his axletree at a willow draught, registers none of this. The captains’ journals would later preserve Clark’s drowning-buffalo observation in fuller form, but Whitehouse captures it on the day itself, filtered through a private’s ear.
The Shape of the Portage in the Ranks
The contrast illuminates a recurring pattern in the enlisted journals across the Great Falls weeks. Gass, whose published 1807 narrative would become the first account of the expedition to reach print, writes as a noncommissioned officer responsible for execution — wagons, axletrees, embarkation points, hours. Whitehouse writes as an observer with time to listen to what officers say at evening camp and to fold their reports into his own pages. Neither man on this date mentions the prickly pear that tormented their moccasined feet, the hailstorms, or the grizzlies that punctuate other portage entries; June 22 was, by the standards of the haul, an ordinary day.
That ordinariness is itself the point. Stripped of crisis, the two narrators default to their habitual frames: Gass to the broken thing and the fix, Whitehouse to the country, the captains, and the slow accumulation of evidence about the land they were crossing.
