One Day, Five Registers
September 17, 1804 found the expedition camped above the mouth of the White River, drying gear soaked in a recent rain. Clark notes plainly that the party “Dried all those articles which had got wet by the last rain,” while Ordway confirms “the Boat loaded, we remained here all day.” The stationary camp freed Lewis, by his own account, to escape confinement: “Having for many days past confined myself to the boat, I determined to devote this day to amuse myself on shore with my gun and view the interior of the country.”
What followed is one of the most expansive natural-history entries Lewis would write on the lower Missouri — and the contrast with his colleagues’ versions is instructive. Lewis sets out before sunrise with six hunters, deploys them tactically across Corvus Creek and the bottoms, and walks onto a plain he describes as resembling a “beatifull bowlinggreen in fine order,” entirely occupied by the burrows of prairie dogs (the “barking squril”). From an elevated plane he counts buffalo:
I do not think I exagerate when I estimate the number of Buffaloe which could be compreed at one view to amount to 3000.
Ordway, Gass, and Whitehouse preserve none of this scenery. Their entries collapse the day into a hunting tally: thirteen common deer, two black-tailed deer, three buffalo, one goat (the antelope), one beaver caught by Drouillard, one prairie wolf killed. Ordway’s entry is the shortest and breaks off mid-sentence in the surviving text. Whitehouse’s account closely parallels Ordway’s structure but adds the comparative note that the goats “are different from the Goats in the States they have much longer ears and courser hair” — a sentence whose phrasing echoes Gass nearly verbatim.
Gass and Whitehouse, Clark and Lewis
The Gass-Whitehouse overlap on this date is conspicuous. Both describe the prairie wolf as “larger than a fox,” both contrast the antelope with domestic goats, and both list the same kill totals in the same order. Gass, however, goes further as a naturalist than Whitehouse, supplying a third deer species with an eighteen-inch tail and offering the hypothesis that the antelope is “the real antelope” — a careful taxonomic guess. Whitehouse trims these speculations away.
Clark, meanwhile, is doing something the others are not: he is recording specimens Lewis brought back, and recording them twice. Both versions of his entry describe a corvid that is unmistakably the black-billed magpie:
a remarkable bird of the Spicies of Corvus, long tail of a Greenish Purple, Varigated a Beck like a Crow white round its neck comeing to a point on its back, its belley white feet like a Hawk abt. the size of a large Pigeon
His second draft refines the plumage description and adds a cross-reference: “(See Suplement in No. 3).” This is Clark functioning as the expedition’s cataloguer while Lewis is in the field — the division of labor visible in real time.
The Mule Deer Enters the Record
Clark also documents Colter’s kill of “a Curious kind of Deer” with oversized ears, a small lacrimal gland (“a Small resepitical under its eye”), and a distinctive tail “round and white to near the end which is black.” His second draft adds the diagnostic gait: “this Speces of Deer jumps like a goat or Sheep.” Gass independently describes the same animal — “black-tailed, or mule deer have much larger ears than the common deer and tails almost without hair, except at the end, where there is a bunch of black hair” — confirming that the men were collectively working out the identity of an animal new to science.
Clark closes with details no one else preserves: a hare sighted, a rattlesnake Lewis killed inside a prairie-dog town, a “light Coloured woolf Covered with hair & corse fur” distinct from the smaller bushy-tailed wolf. The rattlesnake-in-the-prairie-dog-village detail is the kind of ecological observation that survives only because Clark thought to write it down; Lewis’s own entry, truncated mid-sentence at “I made the signal for t—”, never reaches the return trip on which that snake was killed.
What emerges from comparing all five accounts is a day in which the expedition’s documentary apparatus performed at full stretch: Lewis as field observer, Clark as receiver and cataloguer, Gass as competent naturalist-summarizer, Whitehouse as dependent copyist, and Ordway as the terse log-keeper of camp routine.
