The eighteenth of July, 1804, found the Corps moving up the Missouri under what all three journalists agree was a gentle southeasterly breeze and a fair sky. The river, Clark notes, was “falling fast.” The party passed Bald-Pate Island, measured the current, examined a collapsed bluff streaked with iron ore, and made camp on the larboard side. Three surviving accounts — Patrick Gass’s published narrative, John Ordway’s sergeant’s journal, and William Clark’s two parallel field and fair-copy entries — preserve the day in registers that range from the panoramic to the geologically precise.
Scales of Attention
Gass, whose journal was prepared for a popular readership, condenses the day into a single sweeping impression of landscape:
This is the most open country I ever beheld, almost one continued prairie.
That superlative — “the most open country I ever beheld” — appears nowhere in Ordway or Clark, both of whom were more concerned with measurable particulars than with aesthetic reaction. Gass reduces the slipped bluff to “high handsome banks or bluffs of red and blue strata” and notes simply that the party “found some iron ore here.” His audience would not know that the bluff had collapsed, that it stood roughly 200 feet high, or that the iron lay above a bed of slate.
Ordway and Clark, by contrast, dwell on the geology. Ordway records “Some appearence of Iron oar where the Bank Sliped in to the River about 200 feet high.” Clark, characteristically, supplies the fullest stratigraphy:
this Hill is about 200 foot high compsd. of Sand Stone inter mingled with Iron ore of an inferior quallity on a bed of Soft Slate Stone.
The shared figure of 200 feet, the shared identification of iron ore, and the shared notice of the slumped hillside suggest Ordway either consulted Clark’s notes or drew on the same shipboard conversation. Ordway’s phrasing is leaner; Clark’s adds the qualitative judgment (“of an inferior quallity”) and the underlying slate.
The Current Measurement and the Lost Dog
A second point of clear textual kinship is the current measurement. Ordway writes that “the current of the River Runs 50′ fathom in 41 seconds.” Clark, in his field notes, sets the identical figure inside quotation marks — “Current runs 50 fathm. in 41 Seconds” — as though importing it verbatim from a separate observation. In the fair copy he restates it: “in forty one Seconds it run yo fathoms” (the OCR “yo” representing 50). The agreement is too exact to be coincidence; one narrator is almost certainly drawing on the other’s reading, with Clark the likeliest source given his role as the expedition’s chief surveyor.
The most human detail of the day, however, is the abandoned dog. Gass omits it entirely. Ordway notes briefly:
towards night we Saw an Indian dog on the Bank of the River, which appeared to have been lost.
Clark expands the moment into something closer to a small scene:
Saw a Dog this evening appeared to be nearly Starved to death, he must have been left by Some party of Hunters we gave him Some meet, he would not come near
Where Ordway calls the animal an “Indian dog” and reports it lost, Clark hypothesizes a different origin — abandonment by hunters — and records the captains’ attempt to feed it. The dog’s refusal to approach (“he would not come near,” “he would not follow”) survives in both accounts and is one of the small, unembellished observations that lend the journals their documentary texture.
Register and Audience
The three entries together illustrate how rapidly the same day could be filtered through different purposes. Gass, writing (or being edited) for print, favors generalization and the picturesque. Ordway, keeping a sergeant’s daily log, balances navigational data with incident. Clark, compiling both rough and fair versions, layers French place-names (“Chauve,” “Four le Tourtue”), numbered references to islands, and the geological cross-section that no other narrator preserves. Read in parallel, the entries do not contradict so much as complete one another — and they remind the reader that the Corps’s “record” of any given day is in fact a small archive of overlapping, partially borrowed, partially independent observations.
