What is the author's tone in The Journals of Lewis and Clark by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark?

"The Journals of Lewis and Clark" is the result of the combined diaries of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark. Lewis and Clark were co-captains of the Army Corps that conducted the first exploration of the American West up the Missouri River. The trek of the two men at the command of the Corps of Discovery ran for a total of two years, four months and nine days. Though their fantastic odyssey ended in 1806, the Journals themselves were not published until 1814. This original edition of the Journals was overly edited and corrected; luckily, all modern editions of the Journals of Lewis and Clark are either annotated transcripts of the original diaries, or edited versions that correct the major errors in the original document in order to make it more readable. Indeed, it would be very difficult for any reader without a good grasp of historical context to understand the text of the Journals by itself.

Because they were mainly addressing the President, points where the authors made no effort to put their notes in perspective or to explain were edited in the text from its original form. Since the diaries were written by hand, day by day, and often in environment that made writing itself a difficult exercise, the resulting original documents remain hard to decipher. William Clark, who wrote over half of the entries, had little formal training or skills in writing. Clark revised his own entries in the edited copies and tried to incorporate some essential factual corrections. Lewis never revised his own entries and was deceased by the time of the publication. The result is

Of the two men, Meriwether Lewis had the best formal education. However, both men had very bad grammar and spelling habits and their handwriting was not the most readable. To make matters worse, the popular style of writing in the early 1800's involved a great freedom, both from a syntactic and a spelling point of view. To put things in perspectives, the Journals are over two centuries old; yet, among modern historians, debates are still ongoing as to the true meaning of certain of the Journal's passages.