The entries for July 6, 1804 offer an unusually clear view of how information circulated among the expedition’s journalists. The party ascended a stretch of the Missouri near the future site of St. Joseph, rounded a sweeping meander known as the Grand Detour, and encamped at the mouth of a small tributary on the southern bank. All four narrators — Captain William Clark, Sergeants Patrick Gass, John Ordway, and Charles Floyd — record the day, but the texture of their accounts varies dramatically with rank, literary ambition, and proximity to Clark’s field notes.
Clark as Source: The Sweat Passage
Clark’s two parallel entries — a field note and a fair-copy version — are by far the most detailed. He alone pauses to record a physiological curiosity that evidently struck him forcefully:
worthy of remark that the water of this river or Some other Cause, I think that the most Probable throws out a greater preposn. of Swet than I could Suppose Could pass thro the humane body Those men that do not work at all will wet a Shirt in a Few minits & those who work, the Swet will run off in Streams
Ordway picks up the same observation almost verbatim, compressing it into a single clause: “several days the Sweet pores off the men in Streams.” The phrasing — particularly the image of sweat running “in Streams” — suggests that Ordway either consulted Clark’s notes or heard the captain articulate the thought aloud at the end of the day. Floyd, by contrast, registers only the meteorological cause (“a Jentell Brees from the South west”) and the labor of stemming the current, while Gass omits the heat altogether.
Naming the Creek
The small creek at the night’s encampment receives its name from a memorable incident that Clark records with characteristic understatement: “a whiper will perched on the boat for a Short time, I gave his name to the Creek.” Ordway repeats the moment almost identically — “a whiper will perched on the Boat for a short time” — but, tellingly, omits the act of naming, which was a captain’s prerogative. Gass and Floyd both adopt the name without explanation, Floyd specifying it as “Whipperwill Creek it is 15 yards wide” and Gass placing the encampment “at Whipperwell creek.” The pattern is instructive: the sergeants accept the toponym as established fact, but only Clark and Ordway preserve the small naturalist anecdote that produced it.
Ordway adds a detail absent from Clark’s entry — that the prairie opposite the third point was called “Reeveys or St Michel prarie” — suggesting he had access to information from the engagés or interpreters that did not always reach the captains’ notebooks, or at least did not survive into Clark’s draft.
Register and Selection
The four entries illustrate a consistent hierarchy of detail. Clark, walking the sand bar, records geology with a collector’s eye: “a light Sand intersperced with Small Pebbles of various Kinds, also pit Coal of an excellent quallity was lodged on the Sand.” Ordway preserves the navigational sequence — the Grand Bend “is 2 miles out in the River” — but drops the mineralogy. Floyd reduces the day to its essentials: distance made (“Came 12 miles”), wind direction, and the difficulty of the current. Gass is the most laconic of all, dispatching the day in a single sentence.
The differences are not merely a function of literary skill. Floyd and Gass, as sergeants keeping required journals, met their obligation with a brief log; Ordway, more ambitious, produced a fuller narrative that often shadows Clark’s; Clark, as co-commander, recorded both the practical and the curious. The July 6 cluster shows the expedition’s documentary ecosystem in miniature: a captain’s observation about sweat, a whippoorwill’s brief visit, and a creek’s new name pass through the four journals at decreasing levels of resolution, with each narrator preserving what his role and temperament inclined him to notice.
