June 22, 1805, in the Great Falls portage. Two published journals in this corpus record the day: Joseph Whitehouse’s and Patrick Gass’s 1807 book (David McKeehan’s prose). They diverge so far in what they bother to write that they almost describe different work. No published William Clark journal for this date survives in this corpus. Clark still appears in Whitehouse, as a speaker in camp, not as a journalist.
Gass and the axletree
Gass’s fragment opens mid-sentence, already on the prairie with a canoe on a wagon “loaded heavy with baggage,” and with “his wife” in the moving party. The rest of the 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.
A problem identified, a field repair, a craftsman’s verdict on local willow. He notes only that it was “late in the evening” before they reached “the intended place of embarkation on the river.” He does not name the captains, the iron boat, buffalo, or York.
Whitehouse’s wider lens
Whitehouse opens with weather — “a fair pleasant morning. the wind as usal” — and widens the lens. He tracks the division of labor Gass does not record:
Cap! Lewis and Clark with all the party except 3 Set out with a waggon & baggage to take the canoe & loading which was halled on the hill yesterday up to the upper end of the portage, where we Shall form a Camp. Capt Lewis & 3 or 4 men carried all their baggage in order to Stay up their, in order to git the Iron boat in readiness &c.
He says nothing of a broken axletree. Either he was not at the willow draught, or he judged it not worth setting beside what he heard from Clark. The buffalo around the lower camp were “verry thick,” and “Some gangs Swam the River.” Then a domestic line: “Cap! Clarks Servant york killed one which was verry fat.”
What Clark told the camp
The longest passage in either journal is Whitehouse reporting Clark, not writing as 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 does not: he reasons backward along the river they have already traveled. The carcasses on the shores below the falls, he infers from Clark’s report, are the animals that went over and did not rise. He adds that such losses are “a vast deal pleantier” near the falls. That natural-historical inference is the private’s. It should not be read as a surviving Clark entry for June 22.
Whitehouse closes on country, not wagons: high land, “no timber back from the river and but verry little on the river, but bluffs & high Clifts the most of the Shores,” and a country note — “we are a little South of the Mandans, but have had no verry hot weather as yet.” Gass, at the willow draught, registers none of this. Read together, the two pages default to habit. Gass keeps the broken thing and the fix. Whitehouse keeps the captains’ split, York’s fat buffalo, and what Clark said at the falls.
