The entries for October 4, 1804, written as the Corps worked its way upriver above the Cheyenne, illustrate one of the most reliable patterns in the expedition’s documentary record: the enlisted men — Ordway, Gass, and Whitehouse — produce closely parallel accounts of the day’s navigation and routine, while William Clark alone preserves the encounter’s tension and the archaeological detail of an abandoned Arikara village.
A Shared Skeleton, A Single Spine
Read in sequence, the three sergeants’ and privates’ entries appear almost as variants of a single source. Ordway records that the party "halted [and] took breakfast on S. S. an Indian Swam the River to See us. he asked for powder &.C." before passing "a creek on S. S. called Teed creek" and camping "on a Sand beach at the upper point of an Island." Whitehouse’s notebook compresses the same sequence even further:
at g oClock we halted for breakfast an Indian Swam the river & came to us. proceeded on passed a creek on S. S. called Teed creek Camped on the upper point of an Island.
Gass, writing in a more polished register intended (as his published journal would prove) for a reading public, expands the exchange into reported speech: "We informed him that we were not traders, that we had seen his chief and told him all we had to say." The shared landmarks — the swimming Indian, breakfast, Teed (or Tee) Creek, the island camp — and the shared spelling of "Teed" in Ordway and Whitehouse suggest the kind of mutual consultation, or at least overhearing of an evening’s reckoning, that scholars have long suspected among the enlisted journalists.
What Only Clark Saw — Or Chose to Record
Clark’s two drafts of the day diverge sharply from this enlisted consensus. Where Ordway notes only that Indians were "passed" on the north side, Clark records open hostility:
Several Indians on the bank, Call’d to us frequently to Land, one gave 3 yels & Sciped a Ball before us, we payed no attention to them
A musket ball skipped across the water in front of the boats is not a trivial omission. That Ordway, Gass, and Whitehouse all suppress or fail to mention it raises the question of whether the enlisted men registered the gesture as a serious threat at all, or whether the captains had reason to keep the incident from circulating widely in the lower ranks’ written records. Clark’s phrasing — "we payed no attention" — suggests a deliberate de-escalation that the other narrators may simply have absorbed as the day’s prevailing tone.
Clark also frames the begging swimmer as a small diplomatic transaction rather than a curiosity: "we gave him a Small piece of Tobacco & put him over on a Sand bar." Ordway preserves the request for powder; Whitehouse drops it; Gass converts it into a speech. Only Clark records both the gift and the courteous ferrying of the man back across.
The Lost Village of La hoo catt
The most striking divergence comes at the campsite. The enlisted journalists describe an island, a sandbar, scarce wood. Clark, in his fair-copy expansion, sends Lewis ashore and devotes a full paragraph to what they found:
in the Center of this Island was an old Village of the rickeries Called La ho catt it was Circular and walled Containing 17 lodges and it appears to have been deserted about five years
His field notes give the name as "La hoo" and the abandonment as "about 5 or 6 years"; the fair copy regularizes both. Neither Ordway, Gass, nor Whitehouse mentions the ruins at all. The silence is instructive. The enlisted men were camped on the sandbar making down from the very island Clark describes, yet the Arikara fortification — circular, walled, seventeen lodges still standing — did not enter their journals. Whether this reflects the division of labor (Lewis and three men walked the island while the main party tended the boats), the captains’ monopoly on ethnographic observation, or simply the enlisted journalists’ narrower sense of what merited recording, the result is the same: the archaeological memory of La hoo catt survives only because Clark wrote it down twice.
Taken together, the four entries for October 4 demonstrate how the expedition’s documentary archive stratifies by rank and purpose. The enlisted journals confirm the route; Clark’s journals carry the diplomacy, the danger, and the landscape’s deeper human past.
