The Day’s Geography
July 9, 1804 finds the Corps moving up the lower Missouri in steady rain, passing landmarks that all five narrators record with broad agreement: a creek draining a large pond on the starboard side, Monter’s (or Wolf) Creek on the south, an abandoned French hunting camp two miles above the creek, and finally the Loup or Wolf River. Clark, characteristically, gives the fullest topographic account in two parallel drafts, noting that Loup River “heads with the waters of the Kanzas, and has a perogue navigation Some distance,” and “abounds with Beaver.” Ordway echoes the beaver-and-fish abundance at the pond — “a great many beaver, & fish, fine land and well timbered” — suggesting either shared observation at a stop or shared conversation in camp.
Gass, as usual, compresses the day to its essentials:
It rained hard till 12 o’clock. We passed a creek on the south side, called Wolf creek. The man that was snake bitten is become well. We encamped on the south side.
Gass is the only narrator on this date to mention the recovering snakebite victim — a thread of camp medical history the others drop. His brevity preserves what the more topographically focused journals omit.
The Pond, the Pike, and a Naming Decision
The bayou-fed pond on the starboard side draws different details from different pens. Ordway calls it simply “the Creek of the big pond” and stresses its fishery. Clark, in his second draft, records a small editorial decision worth noting:
as our flanking party Saw great numbers of Pike in this Pond, I have laid it down with that name anex’d
Here is Clark the cartographer at work in real time — converting a flanker’s observation into a toponym for the map. None of the other narrators report the pike or the naming. The detail survives only because Clark wrote twice.
Floyd, whose entries are typically terse, lingers unusually on the abandoned French settlement, adding ethnographic color the others omit:
Seve[r]al French famileys had Setled and made Corn Some Years ago Stayed two years the Indians came Freckentley to See them and was verry frendley
Clark and Ordway note the camp’s existence and duration; only Floyd records the friendly Indian visits, presumably gathered from the same French boatmen who had been there.
The Fire That Wasn’t There
The day’s narrative climax is a phantom. A fire seen across the river after dark prompts the captains to send a pirogue across, expecting to recover the four flankers. Floyd’s account is direct:
Saw a fire on the N. Side thougt it was ouer flanken partey Sent ouer perogue over for them and when they got over Saw no fire Seposed it to be Indians fired ouer Cannon for ouer men
Ordway agrees the pirogue “did not find them nor any body else,” and that the bow piece was fired. Clark supplies the interpretive layer the others lack — the suspicion crystallizes into a specific threat:
this report causd. us to look out Supposeing a pty. of Soux going to war, firierd the bow piec to allarm & put on their guard the men on Shore
Clark also names the men sent: “the Patroon & Bowman of the Perogue French,” and reports that as they approached, “it was put out, which caused them to return.” Floyd says only that no fire was seen on arrival; Clark says it was actively extinguished. Whether the fire was doused, died down, or never existed as the men thought is unrecoverable, but the narrative drift toward Sioux hostility is already visible in Clark’s pen and absent in Gass’s, who does not mention the incident at all.
What Each Narrator Preserves
The day illustrates a recurring division of labor in the journals. Clark builds the map and the threat assessment. Ordway tracks wind shifts (“the wind changed from the N. E. to the S. W.”; “the wind Shifted to the N. W. in the evening”) with a precision Clark partly mirrors and the others ignore. Floyd notes human-interest detail — friendly Indians at the French camp. Gass alone tracks the snakebite recovery. Whitehouse’s entry is OCR-damaged and conflates July 9, 10, and 11 into a running paragraph; his July 9 content (“Raind the Most part of the day the hunters did not come in”) largely parallels Ordway, consistent with the documented pattern of Whitehouse drawing on Ordway’s text. The hunters’ absence — the very condition that made the unknown fire alarming — is registered most plainly by Whitehouse and Gass, while Clark and Floyd dramatize the consequence.
