June 17, 1805 splits the Corps into two working parties whose tasks the five narrators document with markedly different emphases. At the lower portage camp, Lewis directs construction of carriage wheels and the unloading of the white pirogue. Upstream, Clark and five men survey the route around the falls and measure the cataracts themselves. The journals divide cleanly along that geographic line: Lewis, Gass, Ordway, and Whitehouse describe the camp’s labor; Clark alone records what the falls actually looked like up close.
The Camp’s Work: Wheels, Skins, and an Overturned Canoe
Lewis provides the most technically detailed account of the wagon-building. He explains that the men are preparing four sets of truck wheels with couplings, toungs and bodies, that they might either be used without the bodies for transporting our canoes, or with them in transporting our baggage.
He further notes the scarcity of suitable timber — a single cottonwood near Portage Creek’s mouth was the only tree large enough to yield 22-inch wheels, and the axletrees had to be cut from the mast of the white pirogue. Gass and Ordway mention the wagons but not the timber problem; Whitehouse, as is his documented habit, copies Ordway’s phrasing nearly verbatim, including the observation that the timber is verry Scarse above the falls.
The near-disaster on Portage Creek appears in four entries. Ordway writes that one canoe turned over, was near hurting the 2 men in hir,
and Whitehouse echoes him almost word for word: one canoe turned upside down in a bad rapid, & was near drowning the 2 men which was in hir.
Lewis, characteristically, generalizes — one of the canoes overset and was very near injuring 2 men essencially
— and adds the engineering context that the creek’s bluffs were too steep to permit any other route onto the plain. Gass omits the incident entirely, noting only that the men got the canoes to a proper place to take them upon land.
Clark Alone at the Falls
Clark’s entry is the day’s singular document. While the others log labor, Clark produces the first close measurement of the Great Falls of the Missouri. He describes the river Confined in a Channel of 280 yards and pitching over a rock of 97 feet 3/4 of an,
and the mist rising 150 yards downstream. The measurement nearly cost him his life: I in assendending the Clifts to take the hith of the fall was near Slipping into the water, at which place I must have been Sucked under in an instant.
No other narrator mentions Clark’s near-fall — Lewis would not learn of it until Clark returned. Clark also marks his name on a cottonwood beside a spring 200 yards below the pitch, a small act of monumentation absent from every other entry.
Clark’s eye for buffalo carcasses complements an observation Lewis makes from the lower camp. Lewis notes that the fragments of many carcases of these poor anamals daily pass down the river, thus mangled I pesume in decending those immence cataracts above us.
Clark, upstream, witnesses the mechanism directly: I Saw 2 herds of those animals watering immediately above a considerable rapid, they decended by a narrow pass to the bottom Small, the rier forced those forwd into the water.
Read together, the two entries form a single observation split across thirteen miles — Lewis sees the effect, Clark sees the cause.
What Each Narrator Preserves
Gass is briefest and adds the day’s only botanical note: a great quantity of flax growing, and at this time in bloom,
along with a sulphur spring opposite the creek mouth that the others omit. Lewis alone reports on Sacagawea, writing that the Indian woman much better today
and is now eating broiled buffalo well seasoned with pepper and salt.
Ordway and Whitehouse preserve the practical detail that the canoes, once hauled out, were turned them on one Side to dry
— the kind of housekeeping note Lewis omits. The Whitehouse-from-Ordway dependency is especially clear on this date: phrasing, sequence, and even the description of the four-foot fall on Portage Creek track within a few words.
The cross-narrator record for June 17 thus assembles a fuller picture than any single entry offers: Lewis’s engineering, Clark’s geography and personal hazard, Gass’s flora, Ordway’s labor narrative, and Whitehouse’s confirmation of what the sergeants saw together.
