The expedition’s October 13, 1804 entries present one of the clearest examples in the journals of how rank and access shaped narrative content. Four men — Clark, Gass, Ordway, and Whitehouse — all record that the boats halted near midday for roughly two hours while a court-martial convened. Only Clark, however, identifies the defendant, the charge, the verdict, and the sentence. The enlisted journalists describe the same event as a logistical interruption.
The Court-Martial: One Event, Two Registers
Clark opens his entry by naming the accused before recording any geography:
Newmon Confined for Mutinous expressions, proceeded on… we formed a Court Martial of 7 of our party to Try Newmon, they Senteenced him 75 Lashes and banishment from the partyy.
His second draft adds that Newman had been tried last night by 9 of his Peers
— a small but telling discrepancy with the figure of seven in his first draft, the kind of inconsistency that frequently appears between Clark’s field notes and his fair-copy entries.
Sergeant Gass, by contrast, treats the proceedings as a scheduling matter:
At 12 it rained some, and we halted to hold a court martial. At 2 continued our voyage.
Ordway echoes Gass almost beat-for-beat:
about 12 oClock it rained Some, we halted [and] a court Martial was held which detained us 2 hours.
Whitehouse compresses the event still further: about 12 oclock it rained some. we halted 2 hours. then proceeded on.
He does not even use the words court martial. The pattern of dependency is familiar to readers of the expedition journals: Whitehouse’s terse phrasing tracks Ordway’s, which in turn tracks Gass’s, suggesting the enlisted men either compared notes or drew on a common shorthand. None names Newman. None records the sentence of seventy-five lashes — a punishment they would all have witnessed.
The silence is striking. Whether out of discretion, deference, or simple convention, the enlisted journalists seem to have regarded the disciplining of a fellow private as the captain’s business to record, not theirs.
Stone Idol Creek and the Arikara Tradition
The same hierarchy of attention governs the day’s ethnographic content. While Gass, Ordway, and Whitehouse note only that the party passed unnamed creeks and camped after dark, Clark devotes most of his entry to a tradition he gathered from the expedition’s Arikara informants. He names two streams — Stone Idol Creek and Pocasse Creek (after the second chief, or Hay
) — and explains the former at length:
2 Stones resembling humane persons & one resembling a Dog is Situated in the open Prarie, to those Stone the Rickores pay Great reverance make offerings whenever they pass… one was a man in Love, one a Girl whose parents would not let marry, the Dog went to mourn with them all turned to Stone gradually, Commenceing at the feet. Those people fed on grapes untill they turned, & the woman has a bunch of grapes yet in her hand.
Clark immediately ties the legend to the landscape: on the river near the place those are Said to be Situated, we obsd. a greater quantity of fine grapes than I ever Saw at one place.
Ordway notices the abundant timber and the narrowing river; Gass notes the steep banks that delayed landing. Only Clark records the grapes, and only Clark connects them to the story he had just been told. The detail demonstrates how his role as the expedition’s principal cartographer and ethnographer shaped his eye: features the others passed without comment became, for Clark, evidence corroborating Indigenous testimony.
What the Pattern Reveals
Clark also embeds a geographic digression absent from the other journals — a summary, attributed to Arikara informants, of the headwaters of the Jacques, Sioux, Cheyenne, and St. Peters rivers. Combined with his record of the silent Sioux camp on the starboard side and the departure of the previous evening’s visitors, his entry functions as the day’s official log: disciplinary, diplomatic, geographic, and ethnographic at once.
The enlisted journalists, writing for themselves rather than for Jefferson, distill the same twenty-four hours into weather, mileage, and a campsite. The contrast on October 13 is not a matter of one narrator being more observant than another. It is a matter of which observations each man considered his to keep.
