The entries for July 3, 1804 offer an unusually clean test case for comparing the expedition’s four active journal-keepers. All four men — Captain William Clark, Sergeant Patrick Gass, Sergeant John Ordway, and Sergeant Charles Floyd — describe the same brief stop at an abandoned French trading house above Cow Island, and all four mention a stray horse found nearby. Yet the accounts diverge in revealing ways, from the color of the animal to the botanical inventory of the surrounding bottomland.
The Horse That Changed Color
The most striking discrepancy concerns the stray horse itself. Clark, writing the most detailed field notes, twice records a white horse — first sighted from the river (“I Saw a White horse on the L. S. in view of the upper point of the Island”) and then encountered on shore, where the party found it “verry fat and jentle” and added it to their small herd being driven along the bank. Ordway agrees with Clark on the color: “we found a white horse on the bank of the river.” Floyd, however, describes only “a Stray Horse on the South Side how Had Ben Lost for Som time,” omitting color entirely. Gass departs furthest from the others:
There we found a grey horse; but saw no appearance of any persons having lately encamped at that place.
Whether Gass’s “grey” reflects a different animal, a misremembered detail recorded later, or simply a looser standard of accuracy is impossible to say. The disagreement is a useful reminder that even simple, observable facts can drift between journals written within hours of one another.
Registers of Observation
The entries also illustrate the distinct observational habits of each narrator. Clark, as captain, is concerned with navigation and topography. He names the islands precisely (“a large Island Called Cow I. (Isle Vache)”), notes a beaver-and-fowl pond opposite, records the failed attempt to pass a sandbar (“we attemptd without Success, & was oblige to Cross back”), and locates the trading house carefully in relation to the bluffs and a small run behind it. His revised second entry for the same day tightens the prose but keeps the same priorities: islands, sandbars, water, and landmarks useful to anyone retracing the route.
Ordway, by contrast, devotes his attention to the land itself. Where Clark catalogs hazards, Ordway catalogs trees:
The land is Good high bottom pine Timber & black wallnut honey locas oak &C. &C. I saw waat they call bucks Eye with the nuts on them
Ordway is the only narrator on this date to identify specific species, and his curiosity about the buckeye — a tree he evidently did not know well — gives his entry an ethnobotanical flavor absent in the others. Floyd, the youngest of the sergeants, focuses instead on the physical experience of the river: “water verry Strong So Hard that we Could Hardley Stem it,” and “the Land is verry mirey.” His prose is the most embodied of the four.
Gass’s Compression and the Question of Sources
Gass’s entry is by far the shortest, and its terseness is characteristic. His published 1807 journal was edited from field notes that have not survived, and entries like this one — a single sentence about stopping at noon at “an old trading place on the south side of the river” — suggest heavy compression. Notably, Gass agrees with Ordway and Clark that the stop occurred at the French trading site, but he adds an observation neither captain records: that there was no sign of recent encampment. This small detail, absent elsewhere, hints that Gass was not simply copying from Ordway (with whom he shared messmate proximity) but recording his own impressions, however abbreviated.
Read together, the four entries for July 3 demonstrate how the expedition’s documentary record was built from overlapping but non-identical witnesses. Clark provides the navigational spine; Ordway adds the botany; Floyd supplies the texture of labor and current; Gass offers the compressed summary. The stray horse — white to three men, grey to one — stands as a small monument to the unavoidable variability of even careful eyewitness testimony.
