One River, Five Measurements
The day’s central geographic event — passing the mouth of the Petite Platte (Little Shoal River) about ten miles above the Kansas — appears in every entry, but the river’s width drifts narrator to narrator. Ordway and Gass both record it at fifty yards. Clark, writing in his field notes, gives seventy yards, then revises downward to sixty in his fair-copy entry. Floyd doubles the others at “about 100 yards wide.” The discrepancy is instructive: these are men estimating by eye from a moving keelboat, and the variance of fifty to a hundred yards across five observers brackets what “river width” meant as a working measurement on the Missouri.
Each narrator latches onto the same secondary detail — that the falls on the Little Platte were, as Ordway puts it, “well calculated for mills.” Clark amplifies this with the note that the river “runs Parrilel with the Missouries for ten or twelve miles,” a piece of regional hydrography none of the enlisted men records. Floyd, characteristically brief, compresses the mill observation to “a nomber of falls on it fitting for mills.”
The Wolf, the Deer, and the Heat
The morning opens with a wolf on a sandbar. Ordway calls it “a verry large woolf on the sand beach.” Floyd sees it on “the Sind Bare.” Clark, in his field notes, adds the detail the others omit — the wolf was “walking near a gange of Turkeys” — and in the fair copy sharpens the encounter further:
a verry large wolf Came to the bank and looked at us this morning
That second version transforms the animal from scenery into a participant. The wolf looks back. None of the other journalists registers the exchange.
Game is everywhere. Ordway tallies seven deer, then notes “the men killed 2 Deer Swimming the River” — apparently a separate count, since Clark’s totals reach nine bucks. Clark alone conveys the density of the herd in prose:
Deer to be Seen in every direction and their tracks ar as plenty as Hogs about a farm
Clark is also the only narrator to record the day’s heat in numbers. His fair copy gives “Farnsts. Thermometer at 3 oClock Stood at 96° above 0,” and notes the party laid by for three hours at noon because “the men becom verry feeble.” Whitehouse, whose entry is heavily torn, preserves the heat in a different register — a sensory one the officers omit:
the day mighty hot when we went to toe the Sand [s]calded Our [feet] Some fled from the rope had to put on Our Mockisons
This is the kind of detail that survives only in the enlisted journals: the sand on the towrope bank was hot enough to burn bare feet, and men dropped the cordelle to get their moccasins on. Clark records the temperature; Whitehouse records what 96° felt like through the soles of one’s feet.
The Mast, and What Whitehouse Was Reading
Three narrators report the broken mast. Gass states it flatly. Ordway supplies the mechanism — “comming to Shore against a Small Tree which hung over the River.” Clark tacks it onto the end of his fair copy as an afterthought: “Broke our mast.” Floyd does not mention it at all, and Whitehouse’s torn manuscript offers no clear reference.
Whitehouse’s entry is the day’s outlier. The expected Whitehouse-from-Ordway borrowing is absent; instead the page contains a latitude reading (“Lat 38, 31, 13 N”), a found gray horse on the west side, and a campsite called “Old town de Caugh” — none of which appears in Ordway, Clark, Gass, or Floyd. The latitude almost certainly derives from Clark’s celestial observations, but the horse and the place-name suggest Whitehouse was either drawing on a separate oral source or reconstructing the entry later from imperfect memory. The torn manuscript makes the question unanswerable.
The composite picture: a hot, slow day of about ten miles, ending opposite Diamond Island with a broken mast, nine deer dressed out, and a wolf that — in Clark’s telling alone — stopped to look at the boats.
