The entries of April 13, 1805, written as the Corps moved up the Missouri above the mouth of the Little Missouri, offer an unusually rich opportunity to compare narrators. All four men — Lewis, Clark, Ordway, and Gass — describe the same stretch of river, the same wild onions, the same goose nesting improbably in the top of a cottonwood. Yet the day’s drama, its geography, and even its arithmetic shift depending on who is holding the pen.
The Squall the Sergeants Did Not See
The most striking divergence concerns the near-disaster aboard the white pirogue. Lewis devotes the bulk of his entry to it, narrating in tense, vivid prose how Charbonneau, steering under sail, panicked when a sudden gust struck:
a suddon squall of wind struck us and turned the perogue so much on the side as to allarm Sharbono who was steering at the time, in this state of alarm he threw the perogue with her side to the wind, when the spritsail gibing was as near overseting the perogue as it was possible to have missed.
Lewis catalogues the stakes with characteristic precision — instruments, papers, medicine, presents for the Indians, three nonswimmers, and Sacagawea with her infant, all aboard, more than 200 yards from shore. It is one of the most cinematic passages in his journal for the month.
Remarkably, neither Ordway nor Gass mentions the incident at all. Gass simply notes that “our small canoes could not bear the sail,” while Ordway records only “a fine breeze of wind from the South.” Clark, too, is silent on the squall. The omission likely reflects the sergeants’ position in the smaller canoes, out of sight of the white pirogue’s troubles, and underscores how dependent the historical record of this episode is on Lewis alone.
Onion Creek, Goose Egg Lake, and Shared Sources
The wild-onion creek on the starboard side appears in three of the four entries with telling differences. Clark, on shore, supplies the field measurements: “this creek is 16 yds wide 1/2 a mile up it and discharges more water than is common for Creeks of its Size.” Lewis reproduces this nearly verbatim — “Capt. Clark who was on shore informed me that this creek was 16 yards wide a mile & a half above it’s entrance, discharges more water than creeks of it’s size usually do” — explicitly crediting his co-captain. The exchange is a clean example of Lewis incorporating Clark’s reconnaissance directly into his own narrative.
Gass compresses the same feature to a single clause: “We passed a large creek on the South side, called Onion creek.” Ordway notes only “passed a creek on the N. S.” — and gets the bank wrong, an error worth flagging for any researcher tracking expedition geography by sergeant testimony alone.
The second creek of the day produces the day’s most charming detail. Clark, exploring upstream, found the creek to be the outlet of a small lake, which he named on the spot:
(which we call Goose egg L from a Circumstance of my Shooting a goose on her neast on Some Sticks in the top of a high Cotton wood tree in which there was one egg)
Both Gass and Ordway preserve the goose-in-a-tree marvel but strip away its naming function and Clark’s authorship. Gass writes that the party “found a wild goose nest on a tree about 60 feet high. One of the men climbed the tree and found one egg in the nest.” Ordway’s version is nearly identical: “Saw a Goose nest on a tree one man clomb it found only 1 egg.” The close verbal parallel between the two sergeants — and their shared loss of context — suggests either a common oral source in camp that evening or, as is often suspected for this stretch, Gass drawing on Ordway.
Mileages, Game, and Register
The day’s distance illustrates the looseness of expedition arithmetic. Gass logs 23 miles; Ordway, 22½. The beaver count likewise shifts: Gass says “some” beaver for the party and 7 for the Frenchmen; Ordway specifies 2 beaver and a fish; Lewis settles the matter at three beaver for the party and seven for the French trappers, adding the consequential note that the hunters “concluded to remain some days” and would not be seen again.
Register differences are sharp. Clark’s prose is observational and faunal — bald eagles, a small hawk, antelope killed in the river, a gang of brant whose voices sound “much like that of a goos & finer.” Lewis’s is hydrographic and narrative, organizing the day around an event and its near-consequences. Ordway is a careful logbook keeper attentive to game and weather. Gass, working from a recollected and abbreviated framework, produces the day’s shortest and least specific entry.
Read together, the four entries demonstrate why no single journal suffices for April 13, 1805: Lewis preserves the squall, Clark names the lake and supplies the survey, Ordway corrects the beaver count, and Gass — even at his briefest — confirms the goose in the cottonwood that all but Lewis thought worth recording.
This analysis was AI-assisted and reviewed by a human editor prior to publication.
