The entries for September 7, 1806 from William Clark, John Ordway, and Patrick Gass describe a single coordinated day on the Missouri: a rear canoe held back to wait for two missing hunters (the Field brothers), a signal gun fired when they were recovered, a midday halt for hunting that yielded three elk, and a windy afternoon’s progress ending on a sandbar. Yet the three narrators occupy different positions in the day’s events, and their journals reflect those vantages with revealing precision.
Command, Compliance, and Camaraderie
Clark, as captain, narrates from the position of the decision-maker. He records giving the order itself:
I derected Sergt. Ordway with 4 men to Continue untill Meridian and if those men did not arive by that hour to proceed on. if we met with them at any Short distance a gun Should be fired which would be a Signal for him to proceed on.
Ordway, the recipient of that order, records the same arrangement from the other end of the signal:
eairly leaving me with my canoe to wait for the [hunters] we waited untill abt 10 A. M. then hearing a blunderbuss fired a head as a Signal that the hunters were a head So we Set out and followed on
The two accounts dovetail almost perfectly — Clark gives the conditional (“a gun Should be fired”), Ordway gives the fulfillment (“hearing a blunderbuss fired a head”). Notably, Ordway specifies the firearm as a blunderbuss, a detail Clark omits. Gass, traveling with the main party, mentions neither the order nor the signal, only that “we left a canoe, with directions to wait till 12 o’clock” — a slight misremembering of the meridian deadline as a clock hour, and a sign that Gass is summarizing rather than transcribing.
Counting the Game, Counting the Wind
The hunters’ tally diverges. Clark and Gass both record three elk; Ordway reports “4 Elk and caught three large catfish which was fat.” The catfish appear in no other journal for the day. Whether Ordway’s rear party caught the fish separately while waiting, or whether Clark and Gass simply omitted them as incidental, the discrepancy is characteristic: Ordway often preserves small subsistence details — fish, fat, the quality of meat — that the captains pass over.
On the wind, Ordway is again the most emphatic. He notes it twice — “the wind So high that we could Scarsely proceed” and later “the wind abated So that we procd on.” Clark calls it a “Stiff Breeze ahead” and adds, with weary humor, “wind ahead as usial.” Gass omits the wind entirely. The register differences are telling: Ordway describes physical labor against the elements, Clark adopts the resigned tone of a commander who has logged headwinds for weeks, and Gass — whose published journal was prepared for a reading public — keeps the prose spare.
What Only Clark Notices
Clark alone pauses to record an observation that has nothing to do with the day’s logistics:
note the evaperation on this portion of the Missouri has been noticed as we assended this river, and it now appears to be greater than it was at that time. I am obliged to replenish my ink Stand every day with fresh ink at least 9/10 of which must evaperate.
This is a quintessentially Clarkian aside — a comparative environmental observation grounded in a homely domestic proof (the ink stand). Neither Ordway nor Gass would think to measure the climate of the lower Missouri against an inkwell. Clark also closes with two pieces of geographic bookkeeping the others omit: that the camp lay “about 2 miles below our Encampment of the 4th of august 1804 ascending,” and that the day’s run totaled 44 miles. The captain is tracking the homeward journey against the outbound one, mile by mile.
The Mosquitoes, in Three Voices
All three narrators close with the mosquitoes — a near-formulaic feature of the late-summer 1806 journals. Gass: “The musquitoes are not so troublesome as they were some time ago.” Ordway: “the Musquetoes not So troublesome as they have been for a long time past.” The phrasing is so close that one likely echoes the other, or both echo a shared verbal report at camp. Clark dissents: “found the Musquetors excessively tormenting not withstanding a Stiff breeze.” The discrepancy may simply reflect the different sandbars or hours at which each man wrote. It is a useful reminder that even shared formulas in these journals were filtered through individual misery.
