The entries of April 19, 1805 share a single circumstance: a northwest wind too violent to risk the canoes. Yet the four narrators present produce remarkably divergent records of the day, revealing how habit, training, and temperament shaped what each man chose to set down. Lewis turns naturalist, Clark surveys the prairie, Gass climbs into the hills, and Ordway tallies the camp’s take. Read together, the entries form a composite portrait that no single journal could supply.
A Shared Frame, Four Registers
All four men open with the wind. Clark calls it a blustering windey day
with the wind so hard from the N.W. that we were fearfull of ventering our Canoes in the river
. Lewis echoes the phrasing almost exactly:
The wind blew So hard this morning from N. W. that we dared not to venture our canoes on the river.
The verbal overlap — “fearfull of ventering” / “dared not to venture” — is characteristic of the captains’ working relationship, in which shared field notes or evening conversation produced parallel openings. Ordway, by contrast, records simply that the party was obledged to lay at our last nights harbour all day,
a sergeant’s report rather than a commander’s justification. Gass omits the wind entirely from the surviving sentence, beginning instead with his own movements: While we lay here, I went out to the hills.
The register differences are telling. The captains explain; the sergeants act. Lewis and Clark account for the day’s lost mileage to a future reader (and to Jefferson). Gass and Ordway describe what they did with the enforced leisure.
Four Landscapes from One Harbor
What is most striking is how little the four narrators’ observations overlap once the wind has been noted. Each man describes a different country.
Lewis, ever the botanist, fixes on a single plant and a single animal. He notes the considerable quantities of dwarf Juniper on the hillsides
, cross-references his own herbarium (see specimen No. 4
), and records that the shrub seldom rises higher then 3 feet.
He then offers a comparative observation on the local beaver:
The beaver of this part of the Missouri are larger, fatter, more abundant and better clad with fur than those of any other part of the country that I have yet seen; I have remarked also that their fur is much darker.
Clark, sharing the same harbor, sees a different scene altogether. Where Lewis looks at junipers, Clark looks at the season’s turn: the Praries appear to green, the cotton trees bigin to leave, Saw some plumb bushes in full bloom.
He also notes Great deal of Sign of the large Bear,
a security concern Lewis does not mention. Clark independently confirms Lewis on the beaver — The beaver of this river is much larger than usial
— but otherwise his eye is on phenology and on tracks.
Gass produces the day’s most geologically curious entry. Climbing the bluffs, he reports finding a part of a log quite petrified, and of which good whetstones—or hones could be made,
and observes evidence of subterranean combustion: I also saw where a hill had been on fire, and pumice stone around it.
Neither captain records these features, though both were within walking distance. Gass also notes a great quantity of hysop in the vallies
— likely sage — adding a botanical detail that escaped Lewis.
Ordway’s contribution is the camp’s quartermaster ledger. He alone tallies the eggs taken from goose nests (Robed Several of their nests of their eggs
) and notes that Some of the men caught a quantity of Small cat fish in the river.
Lewis and Clark mention only the elk and beaver; Gass adds the geese; Ordway alone records the eggs and the catfish. Without his entry, the day’s subsistence record would be incomplete.
Patterns of Authorship
The April 19 entries illustrate a recurring dynamic in the expedition’s documentary record. The captains’ journals run in parallel, often verbally close, and concentrate on natural history, weather, and navigational rationale. The sergeants’ journals diverge from the captains and from each other, capturing the texture of camp life — petrified wood, robbed nests, small catfish — that the officers either overlooked or considered beneath comment. The convergence of all four on the unusual size and quality of the local beaver suggests that this was a topic of camp-wide remark, while the divergence on nearly everything else reminds the modern reader that no single journal, not even Lewis’s, contains the whole day.
