The entries of September 4, 1806, find the Corps of Discovery descending the Missouri near the abandoned Omaha (Maha) village, soaked from an overnight thunderstorm and tormented by mosquitoes. Three narrators — William Clark, Patrick Gass, and John Ordway — record the day’s two principal events: an exchange of provisions with the trader Joseph Aird (variously spelled “Airs,” “Herd,” and “Heard”), and the party’s return to a familiar campsite. Yet only Clark notes the day’s most poignant incident, a visit to the grave of Sergeant Charles Floyd.
Three Registers of an Exchange
The encounter with Aird, an upriver-bound trader who had himself suffered the loss of a boat, produces three distinct accountings shaped by each narrator’s role and habitual register. Gass, characteristically terse, frames the transaction as a mutual practical accommodation:
changed some corn with Mr. Aird for tobacco, which our party stood much in need of; and his party, having lost a boat load of provisions in their way up, wanted the corn.
Ordway, writing at greater length, registers the asymmetry of the exchange more clearly, noting that Aird “Gave us a berril of flour although he had a boat Sunk and nearly all his provisions lost.” He alone records the ethnographic detail that Aird’s party included “a good hunter hired for that purpose a molattoe.” Ordway also supplies the provenance of the corn the party traded away: it had been given to them by the Mandans far upriver — a small chain of Indigenous-to-Euro-American provisioning that his account quietly preserves.
Clark’s version is the most elaborate and the most revealing of command perspective. He frames the transaction as one he himself initiated:
as we were in want of Some tobacco I purposed to Mr. Airs to furnish us with 4 Carrots for which we would Pay the amount to any Merchant of St. Louis he very readily agreed to furnish us with tobacco and gave to each man as much as it is necessary for them to use between this and St. Louis, an instance of Generossity for which every man of the party appears to acknowledge.
Clark records the negotiated terms (payment redeemable in St. Louis), the per-man distribution, and the collective gratitude — all elements absent from the enlisted narrators. Where Gass writes of barter and Ordway of gift, Clark writes of credit, generosity, and the moral economy binding officer to trader to crew.
Floyd’s Grave: A Detail Only Clark Records
The most striking divergence is silence. Neither Gass nor Ordway mentions the party’s stop at Floyd’s Bluff, where Sergeant Charles Floyd had been buried on August 20, 1804 — the only fatality of the expedition. Clark alone reports:
at meridian we came too at Floyds Bluff below the Enterance of Floyds river and assended the hill, with Capt Lewis and Several men, found the grave had been opened by the nativs and left half Covered. we had this grave Completely filled up, and returned to the Canoes
That Gass and Ordway omit this episode is itself worth noting. The visit was apparently restricted to Clark, Lewis, and “Several men,” suggesting the enlisted journalists — Gass a sergeant, Ordway also a sergeant — may not have been among the ascending party, or may have considered the grave’s disturbance a matter not for their narratives. Clark also pauses to note botanical detail near the site: “a number of flurishing black walnut trees, these are the first which I have seen decending the river.” His captain’s eye registers commemoration and natural history simultaneously.
Convergence on Weather, Camp, and Mosquitoes
All three narrators converge on the return to the August 1804 campsite near the Maha village and on the necessity of drying baggage. Gass and Ordway use nearly identical phrasing — “dry our baggage, which got very wet last night” (Gass) and “dryed our baggage which got wet last night” (Ordway) — a textual proximity consistent with the well-documented pattern in which Ordway and Gass’s entries frequently share phrasing, whether through shared composition habits or mutual consultation. Clark’s parallel phrase, “derected every wet article put out to dry, all the bedding of the party and Skins being wet,” is independently worded and more specific.
All three also flag the mosquitoes. Ordway brackets his entry with them (“Musquetoes troublesome” at the start, “Musquetoes verry troublesome indeed” at the close); Clark notes they “became troublesom early this morning” and again “at dark… continued So all night”; Gass omits the insects but mentions that “The natives are all out in the plains” — an ethnographic observation neither captain records in these terms. As often on the return voyage, the three accounts together yield more than any one alone: Clark’s command-level detail, Ordway’s middle-register synthesis, and Gass’s compressed observations of land and people.
