The entries of May 22, 1805 offer an unusually clean test case for comparing the four principal journal-keepers of the Corps of Discovery. All four men — Lewis, Clark, Gass, and Whitehouse — describe the same external events: a violent morning wind that delayed departure, an afternoon’s progress of roughly sixteen and a half miles, and the killing of a bear whose oil prompted an early encampment. Yet the texture of each account diverges sharply, exposing the hierarchies of attention and access that shaped the expedition’s documentary record.
A Shared Frame, Four Registers
Gass, characteristically economical, compresses the day into three sentences, noting only that the wind blew “hard this morning,” that the party “killed a brown bear and some other game,” and that they made sixteen and a half miles to a north-side camp. Whitehouse, writing at greater length, supplies the granular detail Gass omits: two beaver caught the previous night, a wounded bear in the river, a dinner halt at “a handsom timbred bottom,” and — a detail unique to his journal — that Sergeant Ordway and a hunter “killed a large buffaloe.” Whitehouse also specifies what was salvaged from the bear: “we Saved the Skin & greese.”
The captains’ entries, by contrast, share both structure and substance to a degree that confirms the well-established pattern of mutual consultation. Lewis writes:
The wind blew so violently this morning that we did not think it prudent to set out untill it had in some measure abated; this did not happen untill 10 A.M.
Clark echoes the construction almost verbatim:
The wind Continued to blow So violently hard we did not think it prudent to Set out untill it luled a little, about 10 oClock we Set out
Both captains record the same island sequence, the same twenty-yard creek, and the same observation that the river is “about the Same width” with “fewer Sand bars” and a “more regular” current. The parallelism extends to their reasoning for the early camp: each notes it was made to render the bear’s oil.
Divergent Specializations
Where the captains’ accounts separate is in their characteristic specializations. Lewis turns the bear kill into an occasion for natural-historical reflection, advancing a hypothesis that would occupy him for weeks:
I do not believe that the Black bear common to the lower part of this river and the Atlantic States, exists in this quarter… I believe that it is the same species or family of bears which assumes all those colours at different ages and seasons of the year.
Lewis also names a new watercourse — “grows Creek” (Grouse Creek) — for the “pointed tail praire hen” observed at its mouth, and he comments on the scarcity of fish, noting “the white cat of 2 to 5 lbs” as the only species taken since the Mandan villages. None of these observations appears in Clark, Gass, or Whitehouse.
Clark, the expedition’s geographer and pragmatist, supplies what Lewis does not: a hydrological note absent from every other journal that day. He observes that
Maney of the Creeks which appear to have no water near ther mouths have Streams of running water higher up which rise & waste in the Sand or gravel. the water of those Creeks are So much impregnated with the Salt Substance that it cannot be Drank with pleasure.
Clark also offers a quantitative claim — “river falls about an inch a day” — that Lewis does not record, and his soil description (“verry rich Stickey Soil produceing but little vegitation of any kind except the prickley-piar”) is more concrete than Lewis’s gestural reference to “short grass and the scantey proportion of it on the hills.”
Patterns of Transmission
The day’s records illustrate the layered economy of expedition journal-keeping. Gass and Whitehouse, writing as enlisted men, capture mileage, weather, and material outcomes — the skin and grease saved, the buffalo killed by Ordway. Whitehouse’s mention of Ordway’s buffalo, missing from the captains’ entries, suggests that the sergeants’ hunting parties operated at sufficient distance from the main boats that Lewis and Clark did not always log their successes individually.
Between the captains, the verbal overlap on the wind, the departure time, the river course, and the bear-oil camp indicates either shared composition or one journal serving as the immediate model for the other. Yet each captain reserves a distinct domain: Lewis the taxonomic and toponymic, Clark the geomorphic and hydrological. Reading the four entries together produces a fuller picture of May 22 than any single narrator preserves — a reminder that the expedition’s documentary value rests not on any one journal but on the friction between them.
