This analysis was generated with AI assistance and reviewed by a human editor of the Lewis and Clark Research Database.
The entries for May 29, 1804 offer an unusually clean opportunity to compare the journalistic habits of four expedition narrators recording an identical sequence of events: a rainy morning at the mouth of the Gasconade, astronomical observations, a delayed departure waiting on a missing hunter, a short three- or four-mile push upriver, and an encampment just above Deer Creek on the south (larboard) bank. The same skeleton of facts appears in all four journals, but the flesh on those bones — what each man chose to preserve, omit, or elaborate — reveals a great deal about the working hierarchy of the corps’s record-keepers.
The Sergeants in Lockstep
The entries by Sergeant John Ordway and Sergeant Charles Floyd are so close in wording that textual dependence is unmistakable. Ordway writes:
we Set out from the Gasgonade River at 5 O. C. P. M. Come 3 miles passed Deer Creek on the S. Side en-camped all night Jest above on the S Side one man Whitehouse lost hunting Frenchmans pearogue std for him
Floyd’s parallel sentence is nearly identical:
Set out at 5 ock P m Came 3 miles pla]ssed Deer Creek on the S. Side encamped all Night Jest above on the South Side on[e] man Lost hunting French men Left for him
The shared idiom — “Jest above on the S Side,” the three-mile distance, the French pirogue “left” or “std” (stood) for the missing man — points to one sergeant copying from the other, or both copying from a common orderly-book source. The single substantive difference is telling: Ordway names the lost hunter as Whitehouse, while Floyd leaves him anonymous. Ordway, who would later become one of the expedition’s most thorough diarists, already shows the instinct to preserve names that Floyd does not.
Sergeant Patrick Gass, writing his published 1807 narrative from earlier field notes, agrees on the essentials but smooths the prose:
We waited here until 5 o’clock P.M. for the man who had not come in, and then proceeded three miles, passed Deer Creek on the south side, and encamped a short distance above it on the same side. A periogue and eight men had been left for the hunter who had not returned.
Gass alone specifies the size of the relief detail — “eight men” — a detail absent from every other journal for this date. Whether this reflects an authentic memory or his editor Patrick M’Keehan’s later embellishment is a question worth flagging, but the figure is the kind of operational specificity Gass tends to retain.
Clark’s Captain’s-Eye View
William Clark’s entry, by contrast, operates on an entirely different register. Where the sergeants compress the day into a sentence, Clark produces three overlapping drafts: a brief field note, a course-and-distance log, and a fuller narrative paragraph. He records the morning’s astronomical work in technical detail — equal altitudes of “105° 31′ 45″” and Lewis’s meridian observation with octant and artificial horizon at “38° 44′ 00″.” He notes the muddy state of the rising river, the loading of the pirogue, and the bad mosquitoes. His course log breaks the three-mile run into bearings (“N. 54 W 2 m,” “N. 78° W 2 Ms.”) that the sergeants reduce to a single distance.
Most strikingly, Clark alone preserves an evening incident the others miss entirely:
Soon after we came too we heard Several guns fire down the river, we answered them by a Discharge of a Swivile on the Bow
This is the only mention of the swivel gun being fired that evening, and the only suggestion that the encamped party attempted acoustic contact with the rear pirogue still searching for the lost hunter. The sergeants record the man’s absence as a static fact; Clark records the captains’ active effort to guide him in. The detail is consistent with a captain’s habit of mind — Clark is tracking responsibility for personnel, not merely logging the day’s mileage.
One Day, Four Registers
The May 29 entries thus illustrate a pattern that recurs throughout the early Missouri ascent: Floyd and Ordway share a near-identical operational shorthand; Gass writes a slightly more polished retrospective prose with occasional unique numerical details; and Clark layers technical, navigational, and command-level information that the enlisted journals do not attempt. The lost hunter and the answering swivel are the same event seen from four desks of different rank.
