The entries for May 21, 1805 offer an unusually clean comparison of the expedition’s four active journalists. All four men camped on the same sandbar opposite what Lewis christened “windy Island,” and all four were driven from it by the same nocturnal storm. What they chose to write down — and what they omitted — reveals the distinct register and method of each narrator.
Compression and Expansion
Sergeant Patrick Gass, whose published journal is consistently the briefest of the four, reduces the day to a single clause about wind and distance:
towards the middle of the day the wind blew hard; but we went on very well for 20 miles, and encamped on a sand-beach on the North side.
Gass gives the reader mileage (twenty miles), wind, and bank — nothing more. He omits the storm entirely, perhaps because he was writing the next morning and treated the night’s disturbance as incidental, or perhaps because his published text was later condensed by his editor David McKeehan.
Joseph Whitehouse, by contrast, expands the day into a chronological narrative. He alone records the return of the two men who had stayed out overnight near the Musselshell, noting that they “Swam across the Mussel Shell River before Sun rise” with a beaver and a deer. Whitehouse also preserves the social texture of the storm’s aftermath: “the most of the party moved back towards the hills.” Where Lewis and Clark write of moving “our lodge” — the officers’ tent — Whitehouse describes a collective retreat by the enlisted men.
The Captains in Parallel
Lewis and Clark’s entries for May 21 are, as often, closely parallel in structure but distinct in emphasis. Both describe the Missouri’s southward bend to receive the Musselshell, the fertile but timberless valley extending north, and the higher pine- and cedar-crowned country to the south. Both note that the bars are composed of mud rather than “pure sand,” and both record the same tally of game: two elk killed by Clark, several deer, and a buffalo cow.
Clark, walking on shore, writes in his characteristic plain register:
the boint for many miles out in a Northerley direction is a rich uneaven valley Contain Some Short grass, and Prickley pears without timber
Lewis covers the same ground but turns naturalist, devoting a long passage to the pines on the south bank:
the leaf of this pine is much longer than the common pitch or red pine of Virginia, the cone is also longer and slimer, and the imbrications wider and thicker, and the whole frequently covered with rosin.
This is a comparison Clark does not attempt. Lewis also notes the relative scarcity of “growse or praire hen” near the river and speculates they have moved to the open plains — the kind of inferential natural-history aside that distinguishes his journal from Clark’s. Clark, meanwhile, supplies a hydrological detail Lewis omits: “river falling a little.”
The Storm and the Sandbar
All four narrators converge on the night’s gale, but with different framings. Lewis is the most vivid:
we found ourselves so invelloped with clouds of dust and sand that we could neither cook, eat, nor sleep; and were finally compelled to remove our lodge about eight oClock at night to the foot of an adjacent hill
Clark echoes the substance closely — “the dust & Sand blew in clouds” — but compresses the scene and gives no hour. The verbal overlap (“Several loose articles were blown over board” in Clark; “several loose articles blown over board and lost” in Lewis) is one of the day’s clearer instances of the captains either consulting one another’s notes or working from a shared field memorandum. Whitehouse independently confirms the timing — “the wind rose verry high Soon after we Camped” — and the discomfort, but does not borrow the captains’ phrasing, suggesting his account is genuinely his own observation rather than a copy.
Gass’s silence on the storm is the most striking omission of the day. Read together, the four entries demonstrate how a single Missouri-River evening could be recorded as a meteorological catastrophe (Lewis), a logistical inconvenience (Clark), a communal scramble (Whitehouse), or a non-event (Gass) depending on the journalist’s habits and audience.
