The night of August 30-31, 1806 produced one of the more dangerous weather events of the expedition’s return descent of the Missouri: a sudden wind shift that tore canoes from the bank and blew two of them, with men aboard, entirely across the river. Three narrators present — Patrick Gass, John Ordway, and William Clark — preserve the episode, and the variation among their accounts offers a useful case study in how rank, role, and narrative habit shaped expedition record-keeping.
Three Registers of the Same Storm
Gass, characteristically, compresses the entire night into a single subordinate clause. His full entry registers only a
able night of wind and hard rain. We set out early; went on very well all day, and in the evening encamped, where we found the Musquitoes very troublesome.
The OCR fragment “able night” almost certainly preserves the tail of “disagreeable” or “miserable” — a word both Ordway and Clark use explicitly. Gass’s brevity here is consistent with his published-journal style throughout 1806: weather is acknowledged, the day’s mileage is implied, and the mosquitoes get the closing emphasis. A reader of Gass alone would have no idea that men and canoes had been blown across the Missouri in the dark.
Ordway, by contrast, writes from the inside of the rescue. He records that the wind
caused one of our canoes broke loose and I took another canoe and to take it back and with Some difficulty goot it back to Camp a verry disagreeable night
This is a participant’s account — Ordway places himself at the center of the action, notes the difficulty, and then moves on. What he does not say is that he was acting under orders, with a detail of six men, to retrieve two canoes carrying Sergeant Pryor, the Mandan delegation, Wiser, and Willard. That fuller picture comes only from Clark.
Clark’s Hour-by-Hour Reconstruction
Clark’s entry is by far the longest of the three and reads almost as an after-action report. He fixes the storm’s onset precisely — “at half past 11 last night the wind Shifted about to the N. W.” — tracks a second shift to the southwest, and describes the crew’s response:
all hands were obliged to hold the Canoes & Perogue to prevent their being blown off from the Sand bar, however a Suden Squal of wind broke the cables of the two Small Canoes
Where Ordway writes “one of our canoes,” Clark specifies two small canoes lost initially, then a separate pair carrying Pryor and the Indians — “with wiser and Willard in them and were blown quite across the river to the N E. Shore where fortunately they arived Safe.” He then names the rescue party:
I Sent Sergt. Jo Ordway with a Small perogue and 6 men to prosue the 2 Canoes and assist them in effecting a landing
The two accounts dovetail rather than contradict — Ordway’s modest “I took another canoe” becomes, in Clark’s telling, a commanded detachment of seven men in a pirogue. Clark also supplies the resolution Ordway omits: “by 2 A.M. Sergt Ordway with willard wiser and the 2 Canoes returned all Safe.”
What Each Narrator Notices Afterward
Once the party is underway, the three diverge again according to interest. Gass notes only mosquitoes. Ordway emphasizes the day’s labor — “roed on hard all this day without makeing any halt to cook” — a detail neither of the others records, and a reminder that he writes from the perspective of the men at the oars. Clark, freed from immediate crisis, returns to his habitual catalogue: Indians glimpsed on the hills, the Island of Cedar passed at 9 A.M., the “doome and lowest village of Barking Squirels” at 4 P.M., and a careful zoogeographical observation that this is the highest point on the river where he has seen the fox squirrel, two of which he killed in the bottom above the dome.
The three entries together illustrate a recurring pattern in the 1806 descent: Clark provides the master narrative with chronology and named participants; Ordway supplies the laborer’s-eye detail of physical effort; and Gass, writing for an eventual reading public, distills both into a sentence. For the historian reconstructing the night of August 30-31, only the convergence of all three — and especially Clark’s precision about who was in which canoe — makes the episode legible.
