The entries of August 20, 1806, offer one of the more dramatic disparities in scale between any two expedition narrators on a single day. William Clark produces a dense paragraph of hydrology, ethnography, and seasonal botany; Sergeant John Ordway dispatches the same twenty-four hours in a single line. Both men were in the same flotilla, on the same stretch of the Missouri above the abandoned Arikara villages, yet their journals function in entirely different registers.
Clark the Returning Cartographer
Clark opens with weather and movement — “a violent hard rain about day light this morning. all wet except myself and the indians” — before settling into the day’s principal preoccupation: the Missouri itself, which he is reading as a man who descended it nearly two years earlier and now finds it altered. He passes the mouth of the Cannonball, notes “the remains of a large Sieoux encampment which appears to have been made this Spring,” then the Wardepon (Beaver) River, and finally the site of the Arikara’s last 1804 encampment.
What follows is among the more striking pieces of geomorphological observation in the journals:
I observe a great alteration in the Corrent course and appearance of this pt. of the Missouri. in places where there was Sand bars in the fall 1804 at this time the main Current passes, and where the current then passed is now a Sand bar Sand bars which were then naked are now covered with willow Several feet high. the enteranc of Some of the Rivers & Creeks Changed owing to the mud thrown into them, and a layor of mud over Some of the bottoms of 8 inches thick.
Clark is doing something his earlier outbound journals could not do: comparing two temporally distinct surveys of the same river. The willow growth on formerly bare bars gives him a rough chronometer of fluvial change, and the eight-inch mud layer over bottomlands records the spring’s high water. The note that “The plains begin to Change their appearance the grass is turning of a yellow colour” anchors the day in late-summer phenology. He also keeps the faunal census running — wolves on the bank, some buffalo and elk, though “not so abundant as near the River Rochejhone.”
Ordway’s Compressed Ledger
Against this, Ordway’s entry reads almost as a caption:
on verry well the after part of the day of the day pleasant in the evening we Camped on a sand beach the Musquetoes verry troublesome.
The repetition (“the after part of the day of the day”) suggests a hurried or fatigued hand, possibly written at the sandbar camp Clark also describes. Ordway preserves only the elements that affected the enlisted men’s bodies: the improvement of the weather, the camp surface, and the mosquitoes. He does not name the Cannonball or the Wardepon, does not register the abandoned Sioux camp or the Arikara site, and offers no comment on the wind that, in Clark’s account, kept one man bailing in each of the small canoes throughout the day.
Cross-Narrator Patterns
The contrast is consistent with a pattern that has hardened by this stage of the return voyage. Clark, carrying responsibility for the expedition’s geographic record, treats every river mile as comparative data against his 1804 notes. Ordway, whose journal across the expedition is generally one of the more reliable enlisted records, has by August 1806 narrowed his entries to weather, distance, camp, and insect pressure. Where on the outbound voyage Ordway often paralleled the captains in noting tributaries and Indian sites, here he records none of the four landmarks Clark itemizes.
Notably, the two accounts do not contradict — they simply operate at different resolutions. Ordway’s “pleasant” afternoon is reconcilable with Clark’s hard headwind if one reads “pleasant” as relief from the dawn rainstorm. His “sand beach” is Clark’s sandbar on the northeast side. The mosquitoes Ordway singles out go unmentioned by Clark, who on this date is more troubled by waves slopping into the canoes. Each narrator, in other words, preserves something the other lets pass: Ordway the night’s torment, Clark the river’s two-year transformation.
This analysis was AI-assisted and reviewed by a human editor prior to publication.
