The journals for June 25, 1804 cover a short stretch of the Missouri above Arrow Rock, with the party detained by fog until eight o’clock and camping by evening on a small island opposite unusually high hills on the south side. Five narrators recorded the day, and the entries together form one of the more useful comparative sets of the early voyage — short enough to compare line by line, dense enough to expose how each man chose what to keep.
One Creek, Five Spellings
The day’s most revealing pattern is onomastic. A single small tributary on the south side appears in every journal under a different name. Gass calls it
a creek on the south side called Labenile
Ordway writes “Labunie,” Whitehouse renders it
la beane
and pairs it with a “Rowling Creek” no one else names. Floyd, with Clark’s hand intruding on his manuscript, gives the most baroque version:
(un batteur La benne’ River)
Clark himself settles on “Labeenie” in the field notes and “Bennet’s Creek” in the fair copy. Editorial footnotes identify it as modern Mill Creek in Jackson County. The variation is not careless; it reflects each man hearing a French phrase — likely un battoir à la Benne or similar — and transcribing it phonetically from his own ear. Whitehouse’s “la beane” is the closest to a French pronunciation; Gass’s “Labenile” suggests he was copying from a written source he misread.
The same is true of the coal-bank creek upstream. Ordway calls it “Coal or (Chabaned),” Clark writes “Chabonea,” and Gass omits the name entirely, mentioning only that the party “passed a creek on the south side.” Floyd has it as a creek that
takes its name from the bank of Coal
— a translation rather than a transcription, suggesting he understood charbon behind the phonetics where Ordway and Clark simply wrote what they heard.
What Each Narrator Saved
Clark, as usual, supplies the surveyor’s frame: bearings, distances, the falling river (“about 8 Inches in 24 hours”), and the height of the south-side hills (“160 or 180 feet above the Bottom”). He alone records the wild apples, noting that the French
Say is well flavered when ripe, which is the time the leaves begin to fall
— a small ethnobotanical note dependent on his French-speaking informants among the engagés.
Ordway adds the coal bank’s apparent richness and, distinctively, the deer behavior:
we Saw a Great nomber of Deer feeding on the Sand Beachs they feed on young willow & are verry numerious
Clark independently noted the same, almost verbatim in spirit, parenthetically — “the Deer in the Morning & evening are feeding in great numbers on the banks of the River.” The convergence suggests both captains and sergeants were struck by the same scene; it is not a case of copying.
Whitehouse alone records the wolves:
a little above the latter two wolves appeard On Shore A man from on board of the white Peiroug went ashore Shot One of them
No other narrator mentions the incident. Given the well-documented pattern of Whitehouse drawing on Ordway, this is a useful counter-example — Whitehouse here preserves something Ordway omitted entirely.
Gass is uncharacteristically terse, his entry barely three sentences, with the bulk of his page devoted to a footnote defining “jirk” (jerked meat) — material clearly imported from a later editorial layer rather than the field. Floyd, writing what would be among his last entries before his death in August, closes with a personal aside found nowhere else:
(my hand is painfull)
The parenthetical is easy to overlook, but it is the only first-person physical complaint in the day’s record from any narrator.
The Missing Flanking Party
Three narrators — Ordway, Floyd, and Clark — independently note that the shore party failed to rejoin camp. Ordway: “this evening our flanking party did not Get to us this evening.” Floyd, nearly identical: “this evin’ our flanking party did not join us this evening.” Clark, more cautiously: “The party on Shore did not join us to day, or have we Seen or her of them.” The triple notation marks the absence as a real concern, not a routine entry. Gass and Whitehouse pass over it. The pattern — Ordway and Floyd phrasing it almost identically while Clark phrases it differently — is consistent with the sergeants comparing notes at end of day, while the captain wrote independently.
