The Shared Spine of the Day
Five narrators left entries for May 28, 1804, and four of them agree on a remarkably compressed set of facts: hard rain overnight, hunters dispatched, a single deer killed by Reuben Fields, and the Gasconade River measured at 157 yards wide at its mouth. The convergence is unusually tight. Gass writes that the river is 157 yards wide
; Ordway repeats the figure verbatim; Clark, who actually performed the measurement, supplies the additional dimensions —
I measured the river found the Gasconnade to be 157 yds. wide and 19 foot Deep the Course of this R. is S 29° W
This is a textbook case of the sergeants absorbing Clark’s surveying work into their own journals without attribution. Ordway’s phrasing tracks Gass’s so closely (the Mouth of the Gasgonade River is 157 yards wide
) that the lineage from Clark’s measurement outward through the noncommissioned officers’ notebooks is visible on the page.
What Clark Alone Preserves
Clark’s field entry and his expanded notebook entry together carry details that none of the other narrators bother with. He records the consequences of the storm on the expedition’s stores:
onloaded the large Perogue on board of which was 8 french hands found many things wet by their cearlenessness, put all the articles which was wet out to Dry
The blame on the engagés is Clark’s alone — Gass, Ordway, and Floyd all note the rain but none mention spoiled tobacco or a reprimand of the French boatmen. Clark also closes with a small administrative ritual invisible elsewhere: examine the mens arms and equapage, all in Order.
And only Clark explains why no celestial fix was taken: this day So Cloudy that no observations could be taken.
The encounter with six Indian hunters appears in Clark’s entry only — terse in both versions (one of the hunters fell in with 6 Inds. hunting
) — and is omitted entirely by Gass, Ordway, Floyd, and Whitehouse. For an expedition whose mission included diplomatic contact, the silence of four journalists on a six-person Indigenous encounter is itself worth noting. It suggests the meeting was glancing, reported back to Clark by a single hunter, and never circulated as camp news.
Whitehouse’s Misplaced Cave
Joseph Whitehouse’s entry is the anomaly of the day, and on close reading it is not really an entry for May 28 at all. He opens with weather and hunters consistent with the others, then pivots to a latitude reading and a long first-person account of exploring a cave:
I came across a cave on the South Side or fork of a River about 100 yards from the River. J went a 100 yards under ground. had no light in my hand if I had, I should have gone further
The cave passage, the return to find the keelboat gone, and the French pirogue waiting to ferry him belong to the expedition’s later movement upriver — note that Whitehouse’s manuscript then immediately heads Wendnesday 30th May 1804
and continues with rush creek and panther River, geography well past the Gasconade. The cave narrative appears to have been written under the May 28 heading but describes events from a subsequent day, a not-uncommon feature of Whitehouse’s journal, which was substantially recopied and reorganized after the fact. The latitude figure (38°, 44′, 3.5-10″
) likewise sits oddly against Clark’s explicit statement that no observation was possible because of cloud cover.
Pattern Notes
Floyd’s entry is the shortest of his career to this point — a single sentence about rain and the deer — and it confirms his role as the most economical of the journalists in this stretch. Ordway and Gass continue to function as near-twins on routine days, with Whitehouse, when his entries are reliably dated, typically copying Ordway. Here that pattern breaks: Whitehouse’s cave passage has no parallel in any other journal, suggesting it was drafted from personal recollection rather than borrowed from a sergeant’s notebook. The result is a day whose official record is dominated by Clark’s measurements and damage report, while the most vivid prose — a man feeling his way a hundred yards into the dark without a torch — sits misfiled under the wrong date.
