The entries for August 6, 1804, offer an unusually clear window into how the expedition’s record-keepers divided narrative labor. All four men present — Patrick Gass, Joseph Whitehouse, Charles Floyd, and William Clark — note the same physical landmarks: a midnight storm from the northwest, a large island, and the mouth of Soldier’s River on the north side of the Missouri. Yet only Clark expands the day’s entry into a crisis report. The contrast reveals both the textual dependencies among the sergeants’ journals and the captain’s distinctive responsibility for command-level matters.
Shared Landmarks, Shared Phrasing
The convergence of detail among Gass, Floyd, and Clark on Soldier’s Creek is striking. Floyd writes that the party
passed a Creek on the N. Side Called Soldiers Creek it Comes in Back of a Isld near the N.S.
Gass, in nearly identical construction, records that they
passed a creek on the north side, at the back of an island, called Soldiers creek; and encamped on the south side.
Clark’s field note similarly describes a large island on the starboard side with “Rivie de Soldiert” entering behind it. The shared phrasing — creek, island, north side, south-side camp — suggests the sergeants were consulting one another or a common source, likely Clark’s running observations. Gass and Floyd both compress the day to a single sentence built around this geographic anchor.
Whitehouse, by contrast, omits Soldier’s Creek entirely. His entry is a logbook of motion: a fair morning, sunrise departure, an island to larboard, twelve miles before dinner, three deer brought in by the hunters, and eighteen miles total. Where the others orient themselves by named features, Whitehouse orients himself by mileage and meals. The register difference is consistent across his journal — a private’s eye for daily labor rather than for the cartographic record the captains were compiling.
The Storm and What It Cost
Three of the four narrators mention the midnight storm. Gass calls it simply “a stormy night of wind and rain.” Floyd is more precise: “about 12 oclock Last night a villant Storm of wind and Rain from the N. W.” Clark’s two versions agree on the hour and direction but add a detail neither sergeant notes — the storm tore the colors from one of the pirogues. In his field note he specifies the vessel as that of “Bapteest Le joness Patroon”; in the later entry he simply calls it “the bige Perogue.” Whitehouse, who was perhaps sleeping more soundly or writing more selectively, does not mention the storm at all and opens with “the morning was fair.”
This pattern — Clark recording materiel losses and personnel by name, the sergeants registering only weather — recurs throughout the early Missouri stretch. The captain’s journal functions as the expedition’s official ledger; the sergeants’ journals function as personal witness.
Reed, La Liberté, and the Limits of the Sergeants’ View
The most consequential material in the day’s record appears only in Clark. He devotes the bulk of his entry to two missing men:
We have every reason to belive that one man has Deserted Moses B. Reed he has been absent three Days and one french man we Sent to the Indian Camps has not joined us, we have reasons to beleve he lost himself in attempting to join us at the Council Bluff
Clark then announces the captains’ decision to dispatch a four-man party with orders to bring Reed back “Dead or alive” and to search for La Liberté, with a rendezvous set at the Maha (Omaha) nation. Neither Gass, Floyd, nor Whitehouse mentions Reed or La Liberté on this date. The silence is itself revealing: the sergeants either had not yet been informed of the decision, or did not consider the matter within the scope of their journals. Whitehouse’s cheerful tally of three deer brought to camp and Gass’s terse weather note sit uneasily beside Clark’s account of a manhunt being organized.
A small discrepancy within Clark’s own record is worth flagging for later editors. His field note gives Soldier’s River as “20 yd. wide at the mouth,” while his fair-copy entry, citing “one of the men,” gives forty yards. The doubling — whether a slip of the pen or a revised estimate — illustrates how Clark’s geographic figures were sometimes adjusted between drafts, a useful caution for any researcher relying on a single version of his text.
