The seventeenth of July 1804 found the Corps of Discovery encamped on what Clark and Ordway both call the “Bald Pated Prarie,” halted deliberately to take celestial observations and reset a chronometer that had run down two days earlier. Because the party was stationary, the four surviving journal accounts converge on a small set of events — a layover, a hunt, Lewis’s reconnaissance ride to a nearby creek — yet diverge sharply in scope, register, and what each narrator deemed worth preserving.
Compression and Expansion
Patrick Gass reduces the entire day to a single clause:
hunters killed three deer.
Gass, whose journal was later edited heavily for publication, here offers nothing of the layover’s scientific purpose, the latitude reading, or Lewis’s excursion. By contrast, Clark produces two overlapping entries totaling several hundred words, threading together navigational data, a meridian altitude of 43° 27′, bearings to the Bald Hills (“N 25° W for 30 mes”), current measurements taken with a log line, and a medical note that “Several of the party have tumers of different Kinds Some of which is verry troublesom and dificuilty to cure.”
John Ordway and Charles Floyd occupy a middle register. Ordway, characteristically, includes the latitude —
Lat 40-29′ 54″ North
— though his figure differs slightly from Clark’s 40° 27′ 6″, a discrepancy suggesting Ordway either copied imperfectly or recorded an independent value. Floyd, whose entry for the day is brief but whose pen runs on into July 18, gives the clearest statement of purpose:
Lay by all this day for to kill Som fresh meat.
Where Clark frames the halt as astronomical, Floyd frames it as commissary.
The Hunt Count and the Question of Sources
The narrators cannot agree on how many deer were killed. Gass and Floyd both report three, with Floyd specifying that Drouillard (“Drugher” / “Go. Druger”) was the hunter. Ordway raises the count to four. Clark, in his more detailed second entry, lists “G Drewyer Killed 3 Deer, & R Fields one” — reconciling the discrepancy and revealing that Reuben Fields’s contribution may have been omitted from the shorter accounts. Clark’s closing line, “five Deer killed to day,” introduces yet a third tally, perhaps reflecting a late return by another hunter.
This pattern — Gass and Floyd agreeing on a low number, Ordway intermediate, Clark highest and most specific — is consistent with the working hypothesis that the enlisted journalists wrote earlier in the day or copied from a shared source before all hunters had returned, while Clark revised his entry in the evening. Floyd’s note that Lewis “& Go. Druger went out Hunting” suggests Lewis accompanied Drouillard on the hunt itself, whereas Clark and Ordway describe Lewis as having “Rhode out” to reconnoiter the Nishnabotna Creek — a detail Floyd omits entirely.
Details Only One Narrator Notices
Several observations appear in only a single journal. Clark alone records the outbreak of tumors among the men and the bizarre meteorological moment when “a puff of wind brought Swarms of Misquitors, which disapeared in two hours, blown off by a Continuation of the Same brees.” He alone notes Gutrich’s two fat catfish. Floyd alone, writing into the next day, registers what may be the expedition’s first speculative encounter with Indigenous presence:
Saw a Dog on the Bank Which we Sepose to be Indians had ben Lost this is the first Sine of Indians we have Saw.
Floyd’s interpretation — that a stray dog implied a recently passing Native party — is recorded by no other diarist for this stretch.
Clark also provides the topographical insight that the Nishnabotna, ten or twelve miles from its mouth, runs “within 300 yds of the river” and is “at least 16 foot Lower than the river” — the kind of cartographic detail his role as expedition geographer demanded but which the enlisted journalists had no occasion to gather. The day’s records thus form a layered composite: Gass’s bare bones, Floyd’s purposive summary, Ordway’s middle-register log with a navigational figure, and Clark’s twin entries braiding science, medicine, hydrology, and weather into the densest account the Corps produced that Tuesday on the Bald Pated Prairie.
