The 22 May 1804 entries cluster around three shared facts: a fifteen-mile day, a camp under cliffs on the north bank near the mouth of a small creek, and a visit from Indians bearing meat. What separates the narrators is how much context each chose to record around those bare points — and on this date, the gap between Clark and everyone else is unusually wide.
Clark’s diplomatic memory
Only Clark explains why the Indians appeared at all. The enlisted journalists treat the visit as an incident; Gass writes simply that
we were visited by some Indians
and Ordway echoes the phrasing almost verbatim with
Some Indians came to us &C.
Floyd’s entry, nearly identical to Ordway’s in structure, adds only that
Some Indianes Came to See us
. Whitehouse alone among the sergeants and privates notes the gift itself:
Several Indians came to us this evening. Gave us some venison.
Clark, by contrast, identifies the visitors as Kickapoo and supplies the prior arrangement:
Those Indians told me Several days ago that they would Come on & hunt and by the time I got to their Camp they would have Some Provisions for us
He further records the exchange — four deer received, two quarts of whiskey given — converting what the other narrators logged as a courtesy call into a documented act of provisioning diplomacy. The Kickapoos had made a promise upriver and kept it. Without Clark’s entry, the encounter would read as incidental; with it, the day becomes evidence of the captains’ working relationships with riverine Indian nations even in the expedition’s first week of true upriver travel.
The Ordway–Floyd–Gass cluster
The textual relationship among the enlisted journals is conspicuous. Ordway and Floyd both run their 22 May entries directly into 23 May without a clean break, and the 23 May passages are so close in wording — the “wife” or “faim” of the Osage, the tavern “120 feet long,” “40 ab° & 20 perpenticular,” the inspection of arms and ammunition — that one is plainly working from the other or from a shared field note. Floyd’s
120 Long 20 feet in Debth 40 feet purpendickler
reorders Ordway’s dimensions but preserves the same three numbers. Gass, writing for later publication, compresses all of this to a single sentence about the cliffs.
Whitehouse breaks from the cluster on this date. He omits the mileage, omits Bonhomme Creek, and instead names
canon Creek on the Star’ Side
— a discrepancy with the others, who place Bonhomme on the south (larboard) bank. His independent detail about the venison gift suggests he was not simply copying Ordway here, as he sometimes does elsewhere.
What the cliffs obscure
Clark also preserves the violent weather —
rained Violently hard last night
— which Floyd corroborates as
a verry hard Rain
but the others omit. Clark notes the one-hour delay for four (he says four; Whitehouse-style brevity in his field entry says three) Frenchmen who needed to return to St. Charles to settle forgotten business, a small administrative detail that fixes the expedition’s dependence on its engagés this early in the voyage. Lewis is silent for the date; his on-shore walk past the Kickapoo camp is recorded only because Clark mentions it.
Taken together, the five entries demonstrate the documentary division of labor that will persist for the next two and a half years: the enlisted men measure and locate, copying freely from one another; Clark records the human transactions and the weather; Whitehouse occasionally surfaces a sensory detail no one else bothers with. On 22 May the venison is that detail, and the Kickapoo promise — kept upriver, paid in whiskey — is Clark’s alone to preserve.
