The Lewis and Clark expedition was ordered to keep journals in duplicate. Two officers, several copies, redundancy designed in from the start by the president who sent them. What survives is not what was designed. Meriwether Lewis missed over four hundred days of entries. Where both captains did write, they were often copying each other rather than writing independently. The record of the expedition exists mainly because William Clark, the worse speller of the two, wrote something down nearly every day for two and a half years.
I went to these journals expecting a comparison piece. Two men, one trip, the same days written up twice – lay the entries side by side and watch two people notice different things. That is not what is in there, and what is in there turned out to be more useful.
Jefferson Did Not Hope They Would Keep Records
On 20 June 1803, before anyone had gone anywhere, Thomas Jefferson wrote out his instructions to Lewis. Most of the document is about rivers, latitude, and diplomacy. One passage is about paper.
Your observations are to be taken with great pains & accuracy to be entered distinctly, & intelligibly for others as well as yourself
And then, having thought about what could go wrong:
Several copies of these as well as of your other notes, should be made at leisure times, & put into the care of the most trustworthy of your attendants, to guard by multiplying them against the accidental losses to which they will be exposed.
That is a sitting president specifying a backup strategy. He goes further and suggests that one copy be written on birch paper, as less liable to damp than ordinary paper.
Read it as a design document and the intent is clear. Nothing was to depend on a single notebook, a single hand, or a single set of saddlebags. It is the same instinct that makes people email themselves a document, and it is worth noticing that the instinct is at least two hundred years old and that it has always been about the same fear: that the only copy is the one that gets lost. The notebooks that only just survived are full of people who did not think about this in advance, and the notebooks other people kept survive largely by luck. Jefferson tried to remove the luck.
It did not work the way he drew it.
Lewis Stopped Writing
Gary Moulton spent more than two decades editing the definitive edition of the journals for the University of Nebraska Press, and he wrote a separate essay about the thing that any careful reader eventually notices: large parts of Lewis’s journal are simply not there.
from May 1804 to September 1806, there are over four hundred days of missing entries by Lewis during the expedition proper
Over four hundred days. The expedition proper ran a little over two years. And the gaps are not scattered evenly – they include, in Moulton’s words, “a nearly complete lapse from May 14, 1804, to April 7, 1805.”
That is most of the first year. The ascent of the Missouri, the first winter, the meetings with the Mandan and Hidatsa – Lewis, the officer Jefferson had personally trained in scientific observation and personally instructed to write things down distinctly, wrote almost nothing.
Historians have proposed elaborate explanations, including lost field notes that were later destroyed. Moulton’s own conclusion is the plain one: the most likely explanation is that Lewis did not keep consistent daily journals in those periods. He does not dress it up, and neither will I.
And Where Both Men Wrote, They Were Often Not Independent
Here is where my comparison piece fell apart.
Take 26 May 1805, a good day for the purpose. Both captains wrote. Lewis climbed a hill and saw the Rocky Mountains for the first time:
on arriving to the summit one of the highest points in the neighbourhood I thought myself well repaid for any labour; as from this point I beheld the Rocky Mountains for the first time
And Clark, the same day:
from this point I beheld the Rocky Mountains for the first time with Certainty, I could only discover a fiew of the most elivated points above the horizon
Then Lewis, a few lines on:
these points of the Rocky Mountains were covered with snow and the sun shone on it in such manner as to give me the most plain and satisfactory view
And Clark:
those points of the rocky Mountain were Covered with Snow and the Sun Shown on it in Such a manner as to give me a most plain and Satisfactory view
That is not two men describing the same mountains. That is one man’s sentence in the other man’s spelling.
Moulton is direct about it:
the two leaders copied each others’ writings
and, on which direction the traffic mostly ran:
judging from vocabulary and phrasing, Clark most often copied from Lewis, who was more literate and better versed in scientific terminology
Both things are true and the second does not cancel the first. Lewis borrowed from Clark too, particularly for days when they had been separated. But Clark did more of the borrowing, and once you know that, the two-independent-witnesses reading of these journals is gone. If you want real journal entries laid side by side, this famous example is the wrong place to look for them.
I could have written the piece I planned by choosing my dates carefully and not mentioning any of this. It would have been a worse piece.
The Redundancy That Worked Was the Boring One
So Jefferson’s design failed in its interesting part. Two trained observers producing independent parallel records: no. Several fair copies distributed among trustworthy attendants: not systematically.
What did work was this, in Moulton’s words:
From that point on, Clark’s faithful journal-keeping provides us with a nearly complete record.
Clark was the lesser writer of the two. His spelling is erratic enough that Moulton names it directly, describing Lewis as the more literate of the pair and the better equipped in scientific terminology. On the evidence of the page, Clark is not the man you would pick to carry the record.
He carried it, because he wrote on the days when nothing happened.
That is the whole mechanism and it is not inspiring in the way people want it to be. The reason the expedition has a nearly complete record is not that anyone rose to the occasion. It is that one of the two men had made writing an unremarkable part of the day, like checking the rigging, and so it went on happening during the long stretches when there was nothing to say and no reason to bother. Writing on the days you do not feel like it is not the impressive part of a journaling practice. It is the part that produces one.
The days with nothing in them are where almost every journal quietly dies. You skip one because there is nothing to report, and the skip is easier the second time. I write a short email about this sort of thing – what the archives actually show about keeping a practice going, rather than what people say about it. You can subscribe here.
What Daily Writing Actually Protects
Two things, and neither is eloquence.
The first is that it removes the decision. Clark did not evaluate each day for journal-worthiness, which is the evaluation that ends most practices. This is the same discipline that makes a field notebook kept under observation conditions useful: the record is made whether or not anything interesting occurs, because you cannot know in advance which days will matter.
The second is subtler, and the journals demonstrate it better than any argument could. Writing something down on the day preserves what you believed on the day – including the parts you had wrong.
The Most Famous Line in These Journals Is a Mistake
On 7 November 1805, after eighteen months, Clark wrote what is probably the single best-known sentence in American exploration:
Great joy in camp we are in View of the Ocian, this great Pacific Octean which we been So long anxious to See.
Spelling and all. It is on plaques. It is the line everyone quotes.
He was wrong. The edition’s own editors attach a footnote to it:
They were actually looking at the Columbia estuary, not the ocean.
They still had days to go. The water in front of them was a river mouth, wide enough and rough enough to fool a tired man who had been walking toward it for a year and a half.
Now consider what would have happened if Clark had written that entry later, from notes, after he knew. He would have corrected it. Any sensible person would. The sentence would have become accurate and it would have become worthless – a man reporting that on the seventh of November his party mistook an estuary for the sea. The version we have is the only one that carries what it actually felt like to arrive at what you believe is the end of the journey.
That is the argument for writing at the time rather than writing it up afterwards, and it is not a small one. A journal written on the day is the only document you will ever own that records what you believed before you found out. Everything else you write about your own life is written by someone who already knows how it turned out.
Two Things Worth Taking From This
Write on the empty days. Not because those entries are good – they are not, and Clark’s are frequently a list of the weather, the miles made, and what was shot for dinner. Write them because the record is mostly made of them, and because a practice that only runs on eventful days is not a practice, it is a reaction. If you are keeping a journal on a trip, this is the discipline that matters far more than the prose, and there is more on keeping a journal on a trip of your own if that is where you are headed.
Do not go back and fix an entry to match what you later learned. Annotate it. Add a dated line underneath saying what turned out to be true. Keep both, because the gap between them is the only genuinely new information in the notebook – it is the record of you changing your mind, and it is the one thing you cannot reconstruct later.
The whole edition is free to read online and searchable by date. If you want to see what a two-year daily practice actually looks like from the inside, pick any date in 1805 and read every account of it: the two captains, and Sergeant Ordway, and Sergeant Gass, and Private Whitehouse. Four or five men, one day, and a very clear sense of how little of it seemed important at the time.
Most journaling advice is written by people who have not read many journals. I would rather go and look. If that is your kind of thing, my newsletter is short, occasional, and mostly made of what the archives turn out to say. You can subscribe here.
