The June 3rd entries cover a short travel day — five or six miles upriver to the mouth of Murrow Creek on the south side — but the divergence among narrators is sharp. Clark produces two layered drafts running to several hundred words; Gass compresses the same events into a single sentence; Whitehouse offers barely a line. The day’s substance lives almost entirely in Clark’s pen.
One Day, Five Word-Counts
Gass reduces the afternoon to mechanics: a deer, a five o’clock embarkation, six miles, an encampment. Ordway adds the hunters’ tally —
the Hunters killed five Deer while we delayed at this place
— and notes the party
proceeded along the Clifts
, a topographic detail Gass omits. Floyd, writing from the same vantage as Ordway, gives the fullest enlisted-man account: weather shifting from clear to
Clouday with thunder and Rain wind from Es’
, Lewis and Drouillard’s hunt yielding
one Deer & Grown hog
, and a careful note that the cliffs run
3 hundered yardes up the River
from Murrow’s mouth. Floyd’s instinct for spatial measurement repeatedly outpaces Gass’s.
Whitehouse contributes almost nothing usable:
a fair morning. Several men out a hunting. our officers takes observations &c.
The entry is so generic it could belong to any fair morning of the first month. The Whitehouse-following-Ordway pattern that surfaces later in the expedition is not yet operative here; if anything, Whitehouse seems to be writing from a distance, registering only that observations were taken without recording what they showed.
Clark’s Doubled Draft
Clark’s two versions of the entry — a field draft and a more polished astronomical-and-narrative redraft — are the analytical center of the day. The redraft preserves the failed observation in technical detail:
Took meridional altitude of suns U:L with the Octant and Glass Horrison adjusted back observation. the instrument gave 38° 2′ 00″
— followed immediately by the admission that
it was Cloudy and the Suns disk much obsured, and Cannot be Depended on.
This is the rare case where the captains’ scientific apparatus is documented in its failure rather than its success. The first draft only says he
was disapointed, the Clouds obsured the Sun
; the redraft preserves the numerical reading anyway, a habit of recording even invalid data that distinguishes Clark’s practice.
Lewis himself leaves no entry. His movements survive only through Clark, Floyd, and Ordway, who jointly establish that he hunted with Drouillard and then took a walk
of three or four ms. round
before evening observations. Without the cross-narrator record, Lewis’s afternoon would be invisible.
What Only Clark Saw
Two details appear in Clark alone and nowhere else in the day’s record. The first is the toponym Cupboard Creek, named for a projecting rock —
I call Cupboard, Creek, mouths behind a rock which projects into the river
— passed three miles below the night’s camp. None of the other four narrators register this creek at all; Gass and Ordway count only the destination.
The second is more consequential:
at the mouth of this Creek I saw much fresh Signs of Indians, haveing Crossed
, which the redraft sharpens to
much Sign of war parties of Inds. haveing Crossed from the mouth of this Creek.
The shift from generic “Signs of Indians” to “war parties” between drafts is itself an interpretive act — Clark reading the evidence again and assigning it a more specific meaning. No other narrator on June 3rd mentions Indian sign of any kind. Floyd, Gass, Ordway, and Whitehouse all leave the impression of an empty country populated only by deer.
Clark closes the field draft with a personal note absent from the redraft and from every other journal:
I have a verry Sore Throat, & am Tormented with Musquetors & Small ticks.
The redraft tones this down to
I have a bad Cold with a Sore throat
and drops the insects entirely — a small editorial softening that suggests Clark distinguished between what he wrote for himself and what he prepared for the record. The mosquitoes and ticks, vivid and immediate, were the first to be edited out.
