Parallel Accounts, Divergent Emphases

Both Gass and Ordway describe the same sequence: an early start, the return for additional canoes, a violent afternoon thunderstorm, and an arrival at Portage River by evening. Gass, writing in his characteristically orderly sergeant’s prose, frames the day around logistical decisions:

which is all we will bring over, as the other is very heavy and injured; and we expect that the five small ones with the periogues will be suf- ficient to carry ourselves and baggage down the Missouri.

Gass thinks ahead. He records not only what was done but why, and what the consequences will be for the descent of the Missouri. His sentence about leaving one canoe behind is essentially a piece of operational reasoning preserved in the journal — the kind of detail a non-commissioned officer responsible for transport would naturally note.

Ordway, by contrast, gives a more bodily, immediate account. Where Gass writes that “it rained on us hard all the way,” Ordway describes the consequences in vivid texture:

in the evening we got to portage Creek and Camped, rained verry hard and we having no Shelter Some of the men and myself turned over a canoe & lay under it others Set up by the fires, the water run under us and the ground was covred with water

Ordway records the camp — men huddled beneath an inverted canoe while water flows across the ground. Gass mentions arriving at Portage River and notes that four canoes are now safe there, but offers nothing of the night’s misery. The register difference is striking: Gass closes his entry on inventory; Ordway closes his on suffering and a hunter’s tally — “Collins killed a buffaloe and a brarow.”

What Each Narrator Sees

Ordway alone records that two men were left at Portage Creek — one to cook and one to hunt — a small operational detail that Gass omits despite his usual attention to such matters. Ordway also notes that “the portage River raises fast,” an observation about the rising water that would prove relevant to the next day’s work. Gass, however, captures something Ordway does not: the precise role of the men in moving the wagons, writing that “the horses were not able to haul the loads, without the assistance of every man at the waggons.” This is Gass at his most characteristic — attentive to the mechanics of labor and the deployment of manpower.

The two accounts also differ on Gass’s own condition. Gass mentions, almost in passing, that he “was by this time so much recovered as to be able to return with the party for another canoe.” Ordway makes no reference to Gass’s recent illness or recovery. This is one of the rare moments where Gass’s journal preserves personal information that the parallel record entirely overlooks.

A Day of Two Geographies

Read alongside Clark’s famous inscription at Pompy’s Tower hundreds of miles to the southeast, the Gass and Ordway entries underscore how dispersed the expedition has become in its final summer. While Clark carves “Wm Clark July 25 1806” into sandstone — leaving what remains the only physical trace of the Corps still in its original location — Gass and Ordway are crouched under a canoe in the rain, hauling waterlogged wagons across familiar mud. Neither party knows what the other is doing on this date. The journals would not be reconciled until the captains reunited at the confluence of the Yellowstone and the Missouri in mid-August.

That the same date produced both a triumphant geographic gesture and a soaking, sleepless camp speaks to the texture of the return journey: spectacle and drudgery proceeding on parallel tracks, recorded by different hands, and reassembled only later by readers like us.

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Weather, Mileage, and Reconnaissance: Three Registers

Ordway’s entry is the briefest and the only one centered on weather and camp damage. He reports a stormy night with high winds from the southwest and notes that the swell

dashed one of our canoes against the logs and was near Splitting it before we got it out. dammaged it and obledged us to move some of our Camps.

Strikingly, neither Clark nor Gass mentions this canoe damage. Clark opens his entry by describing the morning as “a fine morning Calm,” and Gass likewise calls it an early start with abundant waterfowl. The discrepancy is partly chronological — Ordway is reporting overnight conditions while the others describe daytime travel — but it also reflects Ordway’s recurring tendency to log practical camp incidents the captains pass over.

Gass, by contrast, produces what reads almost like a sergeant’s logistical summary. He notes the 10 o’clock arrival at a large island, identifies the south-side tributary as the Sho-sho-ne or Ki-moo-ee-nem (the Snake), describes native lodges of “bulrushes and flags, made into a kind of mats,” and ends with the day’s tally:

About 3 miles lower down we came to the first falls or great rapids; and had 1300 yards of a portage over bad ground… Our voyage to-day, to the head of the rapids or falls was 18 miles.

Gass’s 1300-yard portage and Clark’s “distance 1200 yards” diverge by a hundred yards — a small but characteristic discrepancy that recurs throughout the journals when Gass paraphrases distances independently rather than copying from Clark’s courses-and-distances.

Clark’s Ethnographic and Geographic Detail

Clark’s double entry — a summary version followed by a longer narrative — is by far the most expansive. Where Gass mentions the Snake River in one sentence, Clark devotes a full paragraph to his and Lewis’s reconnaissance up the tributary’s mouth, observing

an emence body of water Compressd in a narrow Chanel of about 200 yds in width, fomeing over rocks maney of which presented their tops above the water

This is the river Gass calls the Sho-sho-ne and that Clark, tellingly, leaves unnamed: “this River haveing no Indian name that we could find out.” The contrast suggests Gass may have written or revised his entry later with the benefit of subsequently confirmed nomenclature, while Clark records the live ethnographic uncertainty of the moment.

Clark also captures details neither Ordway nor Gass records: the count of “17 Lodges of Indians” at the upper portage and “5 large Loges” below; the “20 parcels of dryed and pounded fish” on a small island; the neatness of the baskets weighing “about 90 or 100 pounds”; the hiring of Indigenous laborers to carry heavy articles; the purchase of a dog for supper; and the difficulty of obtaining firewood. Most striking is his geopolitical observation:

no Indians reside on the Lard Side for fear of the Snake Indians with whome they are at war and who reside on the large fork on the lard. a little above

This single sentence encodes intelligence about regional conflict that neither of the other narrators records — the kind of detail that distinguishes Clark as the expedition’s primary ethnographer and cartographer.

Patterns of Omission and Emphasis

Read together, the three entries demonstrate the complementary nature of the Corps’s documentary record. Ordway preserves the camp-level disruption — a damaged canoe, shifted tents — that the captains either did not witness or chose not to record. Gass produces a clean operational précis suitable for his later published narrative, with rounded mileages and tribal names normalized. Clark layers ethnography, hydrography, and political geography onto the same day’s events.

None of the three appears to be copying directly from another on this date; the divergent details (canoe damage, portage length, river naming) make textual dependence unlikely. Instead, October 22 stands as a useful case study in how three observers, traveling together through the same rapids, produced records that must be read in concert to reconstruct the day in full.

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Lewis’s Anxious Engineering

Lewis’s entry is by far the longest and the most introspective. Having moved the boat into the open, scaffolded her, and kindled fires beneath her to hasten drying, he sets men to pounding charcoal to compound with beeswax and buffalo tallow — a substitute caulking after pitch-bearing pine proved unavailable on the upper Missouri. The tone wavers between pride and dread:

now my only hope and resource for paying my boat; I sincerely hope it may answer yet I fear it will not. the boat in every other rispect completely answers my most sanguine expectation; she is not yet dry and eight men can carry her with the greatest ease; she is strong and will carry at least 8,000 lbs.

Lewis already diagnoses the failure he fears, noting that

the stitches begin to gape very much since she has began to dry

and reasoning that a sharp-pointed awl rather than a cutting needle would have preserved the seams. This is the entry of a man who has invested his reputation in an experiment and is watching the evidence accumulate against him. Within days the boat would indeed leak and be abandoned.

Clark’s External View

Clark’s entry covers the same camp but from outside the boat shed. He records the weather (

worm and Sultrey

), the unsuccessful stalk on a large gang of buffalo whose pursuit he led personally, the day’s tally of three buffalo, two wolves, and three antelope, and the three men sent to view the falls. His single sentence on the leather boat is striking in its brevity:

Capt. Lewis much engaged in Completeing the Leather boat.

Where Lewis devotes paragraphs to charcoal, beeswax, gaping stitches, and carrying capacity, Clark dispatches the project in seven words. The division of attention is characteristic: throughout the expedition Clark tends to chronicle the party’s movements and the country’s resources, while Lewis turns inward toward natural history, technical problems, and reflection.

Clark also notices what Lewis does not —

great numbers of young black birds

— a small ornithological detail from the hand usually thought less attentive to such things than Lewis. It is a useful reminder that the conventional contrast between Lewis-the-naturalist and Clark-the-cartographer breaks down on any given page.

Gass’s Sergeant’s-Eye Compression

Patrick Gass, writing for what would become the first published account of the expedition, reduces the day to its bottom line:

us who were engaged at the boat, went to hunt; at night they came in and had killed several buffaloe and some cabres or antelopes.

Gass identifies himself with the boat-working detail (us who were engaged at the boat), confirming Lewis’s reference to the men assigned to the project, but he offers no detail about the work itself. His vocabulary preserves the frontier French loanword cabres for antelope — a usage neither captain employs on this date — suggesting he is registering the spoken speech of the camp’s engagés and Canadian hands rather than the captains’ more anglicized antelopes. Gass’s economy is partly a function of his journal’s purpose: a sergeant’s daily log rather than a captain’s report to Jefferson.

Cross-Narrator Patterns

The three accounts converge on a small set of verifiable facts — three buffalo, two wolves, three antelope, three men sent to the falls, the leather boat under work — but diverge sharply in what each narrator considers worth recording around those facts. Lewis alone offers the meditative observation that scattered buffalo herds, however distant, tend to travel in one direction when undisturbed, and that the plains here are less fertile and stonier than below the Musselshell. These are the kinds of generalizations Clark and Gass typically leave to him. Conversely, Clark’s notice of the young blackbirds and Gass’s vernacular cabres each preserve something the other narrators miss. Read together, the three entries demonstrate why no single journal suffices: the day at the portage camp exists fully only in their overlap.

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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.

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Lewis’s Naturalist Patience and Builder’s Anxiety

Lewis’s entry is the longest and most layered. He opens with weather (“a heavy dew this morning which is a remarkable event”), moves to a detailed labor roster — Frazier and Whitehouse sewing skins, Shields and Gass shaving bark, Fields making cross braces, Drouillard and himself rendering tallow — and then breaks into an unusually candid expression of frustration:

I begin to be extremely impatient to be off as the season is now waisting a pace nearly three months have now elapsed since we left Fort Mandan and not yet reached the Rocky Mountains

From this anxiety Lewis pivots, characteristically, into natural history, distinguishing the “large goat-sucker or night-hawk” from the eastern whip-poor-will and noting the absence of the “leather winged bat” in this country. He records that the boat has now consumed “28 Elk skins and 4 Buffaloe skins” — the kind of precise inventory Clark almost never bothers with. He closes with worry that “some uncommon accedent has happened” to Clark’s party, then appends a separate section, “Occurrences with Capt. Clark and Party,” reconstructed from later report.

Clark’s Logistical Eye and the Recovered Compass

Clark, writing from the scene Lewis can only imagine, is terser and more operational. The two accounts of his day overlap closely — both note the four men set to repairing axletrees, the run fallen to about three feet, and the dispatch of two men to search for articles lost in the ravine. The detail both narrators preserve is the compass:

the two men dispatched in Serch of the articls lost yesterday returned and brought the Compass which they found in the mud & Stones near the mouth of the revein

Lewis’s parallel sentence — “returned with the compas which they found covered in the mud” — is clearly derived from Clark’s report, with Lewis abbreviating. This is one of the clearer instances on the portage where Lewis’s text demonstrably follows Clark’s rather than the reverse.

Clark alone notices the human cost of the prior day’s hail: “men Complain of being Swore this day dull and lolling about.” Lewis echoes this (“the men complained much today of the bruises and wounds which they had received yesterday from the hail”) but in more formal register. Clark also offers the day’s most striking image, one entirely absent from Lewis: “Great numbers of Buffalow in every direction, I think 10,000 may be Seen in a view.”

Whitehouse’s Displacement and Gass’s Silence

Whitehouse’s entry sits oddly against the others. He describes setting out, passing rapids that had to be “double manned,” cutting his foot “with the Stone a towing along the Shore,” and camping after sixteen miles — a travel narrative inconsistent with Lewis’s placement of him at the boat-sewing detail. The entry likely reflects Whitehouse’s later editorial reworking of his journal, in which scenes from later upriver travel were folded back into portage dates. His sensory register — currants eaten in “abundance,” springs running “from under the clifts,” mountains ahead that “appear to have Snow on them, if not Snow it must be verry white Clay or rocks” — preserves an enlisted man’s eye for landscape that the captains, preoccupied with iron frames and lost compasses, do not record on this date.

Gass, meanwhile, contributes only the laconic note that “The men with the canoe and baggage did not return, as we expected,” mirroring Lewis’s anxiety in a single understated line. Across the four hands, June 30 illustrates how the Corps’ record fractures and recombines: Clark sees the men, Lewis sees the birds and the boat, Whitehouse sees the country, and Gass sees only what is missing.

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Three Registers for One Bear Hunt

Gass, whose published 1807 journal was edited for a popular audience, transforms the hunt into mock-heroic theater. His bear is no animal but a sovereign:

In the evening, the most of the corps crossed over to an island, to attack and rout its monarch, a large brown bear, that held possession and seemed to defy all that would attempt to besiege him there. Our troops, however, stormed the place, gave no quarter, and its commander fell.

The diction — “monarch,” “besiege,” “stormed,” “commander,” “no quarter” — frames the corps as a miniature army conducting a siege. Gass (or his editor David McKeehan) supplies narrative shape and a punchline: “Our army returned the same evening to camp without having suffered any loss on their side.”

Lewis, by contrast, writes as a naturalist and field commander. He names the shooter (Drewyer), specifies the range (“about 20 feet”), traces the ball’s path (“through his heart”), and reconstructs the pursuit by blood trail for “about a hundred yards.” He estimates the carcass at 400 pounds and identifies the animal as a young male. Where Gass renders spectacle, Lewis renders evidence.

Clark’s entry is the most compressed. His first version reduces the entire afternoon to two clauses:

we Crossed to a large Island nearly opposit to us to kill bear which has been Seen frequently in the Island, we killed one bear & returned at Sun Set.

His expanded version adds context — that the bear had been sighted the previous evening, that twelve men accompanied the captains — but never approaches Lewis’s procedural detail or Gass’s literary flourish.

What Each Narrator Notices

Beyond the hunt, the entries diverge in what each man considers worth recording. Lewis devotes a long paragraph to a meteorological hypothesis about the persistent southwesterly winds, speculating that air chilled by the snowy mountains “glides down the sides of these mountains & decends to the plains, where by the constant action of the sun on the face of an untimbered country there is a partial vacuum formed for it’s reception.” He then qualifies his own theory: “I am far from giving full credit to my own hypothesis on this subject.” Clark notes only that the wind is “as usial from the S. W. and hard,” and Gass omits the wind entirely.

The captured rat shows the inverse pattern: Lewis and Clark both describe it; Gass does not mention it. The two captains’ descriptions are clearly drawn from shared observation but recorded independently. Lewis offers fuller anatomical detail — “the body and outer part of the legs and head of a light lead colour, the belly and inner side of the legs white” — while Clark’s parallel description is shorter but matches in essentials: “larger ears, long whiskers & toes, with a tail long & hairey like a ground Squirel, verry fine fur and lighter than the Common rat.” Clark’s simile (“like a ground Squirel”) is his own; Lewis does not use it. This is one of the early Corps descriptions of what would later be identified as the bushy-tailed woodrat (Neotoma cinerea).

Patterns of Influence and Independence

The captains’ entries for July 2 show their characteristic relationship: Clark working in close parallel to Lewis but in shorter compass, sometimes producing two drafts of the same day (as here), and occasionally introducing details — like the previous evening’s bear sighting — that Lewis omits. There is no sign that Gass had access to the captains’ journals; his account stands apart in its narrative shaping, suggesting either his own sensibility or his editor’s hand. Notably, Gass alone records the completion of the baggage portage as the men’s emotional milestone, while Lewis frames the same return as a workforce reporting back: “the party returned with the baggage, all well pleased that they had completed the laborious task of the portage.”

Read together, the three entries demonstrate how a single day at the Great Falls produces a scientific essay, a logistical log, and a comic war report — depending on who holds the pen.

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The scene depicts the late June 1805 phase of the expedition, when Meriwether Lewis first encountered the Great Falls on June 13 and the party then undertook the arduous portage around the series of five cascades over roughly the next month. The journals describe the falls in detail and record that Sacagawea, recovering from severe illness, was with the party as they reconnoitered the terrain. By placing her prominently in the composition, Seltzer reflected the early twentieth-century reframing of Sacagawea as a central expedition figure, a popular cultural shift driven by Eva Emery Dye’s 1902 novel and by suffrage-era monuments and pageants.

Olaf Carl Seltzer (1877–1957) was a Danish-born painter who emigrated to Great Falls, Montana, in 1892 and became a close friend and studio associate of Charles M. Russell. After Russell’s death in 1926, Seltzer increasingly took on historical commissions, and in the late 1920s he began a long association with Tulsa oilman Thomas Gilcrease, for whom he eventually produced a large series of small historical paintings documenting events of the American West. This 1927 canvas dates from the start of that productive late phase. The painting is held in the Gilcrease Museum collection in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where Seltzer’s expedition and frontier subjects form one of the strongest concentrations of his work. Among Lewis and Clark imagery, Seltzer’s contributions are valued for their geographic accuracy, owing to his long residence in Great Falls within sight of the very landscape depicted.

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