Five members of the Corps left entries for June 9, 1804, and four of them describe the same incident: the keelboat’s stern catching on a submerged log near a second island, the current swinging her broadside into drifting timber, and the crew freeing her within minutes. The convergence is unusual this early in the voyage, and the variations in emphasis offer a clean window into how each narrator understood his role as a recorder.
One Accident, Four Tellings
Patrick Gass renders the episode in a single compact sentence:
This day going round some drift wood, the stern of the boat became fast, when she immediately swung round, and was in great danger; but we got her off without much injury.
Gass’s instinct, here as elsewhere, is summary. He names the hazard, the consequence, and the resolution without elaboration. Charles Floyd does not mention the incident at all — a striking omission given that Floyd, like Gass, was a sergeant. His entry instead catalogues distances, creek widths, and terrain (“this is a butifull Contry of Land the River at this place is 300 yas wide”), suggesting Floyd saw his journal as a topographic record rather than a narrative one.
John Ordway compresses the day’s earlier snag — “log detained us half an hour” — but skips the more dangerous later swing entirely, closing simply: “we Camped on an Island at left Side.” Ordway’s brevity on June 9 is notable because his entries elsewhere run longer; the day’s drama did not register as worth preserving.
William Clark, predictably, supplies the fullest account, and his version is the one that converts an accident into a passage of self-conscious prose:
This was a disagreeable and Dangerous Situation, particularly as immense large trees were Drifting down and we lay imediately in their Course, Some of our men being prepared for all Situations leaped into the water Swam ashore with a roap, and fixed themselves in Such Situations, that the boat was off in a fiew minits, I can Say with Confidence that our party is not inferior to any that was ever on the waters of the Missoppie
The boast is uncharacteristic for Clark this early in the journey, and it is the only narrator’s verdict on crew quality recorded for the day. Gass’s “without much injury” and Ordway’s silence offer no such judgment. Clark also alone notes that the men leapt into the river with a rope and anchored themselves on shore — the actual mechanics of the rescue. His second, recopied entry softens the language to “by the active exertions of our party we got her off,” stripping the praise but preserving the maneuver.
Whitehouse Out of Sequence
Joseph Whitehouse’s entry for this date is plainly displaced. It describes the Charrottoe (Charette) prairie, a meeting with seven peirogues loaded with peltry bound for Chouteau, and a separate sandbar incident in which “the Barge Struck a Sandbar She keeld On her labord the Sand being Quick Vanquishd Suddently from Under her” — an episode reaching the Grand River, which the party had not yet attained on June 9. Whitehouse’s journal here is recapitulating earlier days, possibly drafted retrospectively from notes or from Ordway, whom he is documented to have copied at other points in the expedition. The entry’s value for June 9 is essentially nil; its value as evidence of Whitehouse’s compositional method is considerable.
What Only Clark Records
Two further details survive only in Clark. First, the river was rising and the current “excessive rapid” — a hydrological note absent from Gass and Floyd, who give the width but not the trend. Second, and more privately, Clark closes with a medical aside:
We discovered that one of our French hands had a Conpt. We Commsd Doctering, I hope the Success in this case, usial
The “Conpt” — likely a venereal complaint, given Clark’s elliptical phrasing and the standard reading — is the kind of detail the sergeants either did not know or chose not to record. It is a reminder that Clark’s journal, for all its public posture, doubled as a confidential log of the party’s working condition.
The day’s lesson, drawn only by reading the five accounts together, is methodological: Gass narrates, Floyd surveys, Ordway abridges, Whitehouse drifts, and Clark alone treats the journal as both a record and a defense of the men under his command.
