July 29, 1804 found the Corps moving slowly up the Missouri above the Platte, having dispatched a French-speaking emissary to summon the Oto for a council. Five narrators recorded the day, and the entries diverge sharply in what each man considered worth preserving — diplomatic logistics, natural history, weather, accident, or wonder.
The Emissary and the Reason for Delay
All five entries open with the same event: a Frenchman sent with the visiting Indian to gather the rest of the Oto. Only Ordway names him — twice — as J Barter . . . a Frenchman who could Speak the Zoteau language
, the man elsewhere called La Liberté. Clark uses the alias (la Liberty
); Whitehouse renders it LiBerty
; Gass and Floyd leave him anonymous. The editorial footnote in Ordway’s text registers this as a genuine identification problem, since La Liberté would shortly desert and vanish from the historical record.
Floyd alone supplies the political reasoning behind the small Oto party’s circumstances:
the Reasen this man Gives of His being with so small a party is that He Has not Got Horses to Go in the Large praries after the Buflows but Stayes about the Town and River to Hunte the Elke to seporte thare famileys
This is the kind of ethnographic detail the captains’ journals routinely flatten into procedural summary. Floyd, the sergeant who would be dead within three weeks, captured a fragment of Oto economic life that none of the other four thought to record.
The Catfish, the Hurricane, the Badger
Clark’s entry is the day’s natural-history showpiece. He alone describes the catfish in measurable terms: a quart of Oile Came out of the Surpolous fat of one of these fish
. Ordway confirms the catch — Several of the largest cat fish we have ever caught in this River
— and adds the vivid detail that one Swallowed a hook bit of[f] the line, caught the Same & hook
, a recovery story Clark omits. Gass and Floyd ignore the fish entirely.
Clark is also the only narrator to register the storm-damaged forest they passed, reading the landscape as forensic evidence:
passed much falling timber apparently the ravages of a Dreadfull harican which had passed obliquely across the river from N. W. to S E about twelve months Since, many trees were broken off near the ground the trunks of which were Sound and four feet in Diameter
Gass notes the same site — a bank, where there was a quantity of fallen timber
— but without diagnosis. Ordway and Whitehouse do not mention it.
Whitehouse alone, meanwhile, reaches for the day’s strangest detail: a badger shot by Joseph Field. Joseph fields Shot a Brareowe he is the form of a dog. his colour is Gray his talents on the four feet is 1¼ Inch long his picture never was Seen by any of the party before.
No other narrator records the animal on this date, though it would become a celebrated specimen. Whitehouse’s wording — that its picture never was Seen by any of the party before
— is a private soldier’s register of zoological novelty, separate from the captains’ more systematic descriptions.
Patterns of Attention
The expected Whitehouse-from-Ordway dependency is unusually weak on this date. Whitehouse names a creek Potts Creak aBout 20 yds at the Mouth
where Ordway and Clark both call it Boyer (25–30 yards), and his entry preserves a personal injury report — I Cut my [word illegible] on the 27 had to Lay by my ower
— that has no parallel in Ordway. The editorial note flagging two handwriting changes within Whitehouse’s manuscript suggests this entry was assembled from more than one source, which may explain its unusual independence.
Willard’s lost tomahawk and lost rifle generate four overlapping accounts. Gass omits both. Whitehouse mentions only the tomahawk left at the previous camp. Ordway gives the fullest version: Willard lost his rifle in a large Creek called Boyer . . . the white pearogue went back with him & got out his Rifle, which was sunk deep in the mud
. Clark assigns the recovery to a different man — R. Fields Dived & brought it up
— a small but genuine factual divergence between the sergeant and the captain on who actually retrieved the weapon.
Read together, the five entries reconstruct a fuller July 29 than any single journal allows: Clark’s measured naturalism, Ordway’s procedural completeness, Floyd’s ear for Indian testimony, Whitehouse’s eye for the unfamiliar animal, and Gass’s terse skeleton of motion and camp.
