Strong westerly winds pinned the expedition in camp through most of May 31, 1804, and every journalist on duty noted the delay. The day’s surface facts are unanimous across five narrators: a hard wind from the west, a single deer killed by Reuben Field, and a fur-laden craft coming downriver from Osage country. Beneath that consensus, however, the entries diverge sharply in what each man considered worth recording — and Clark alone captured the day’s political substance.
The Same Pirogue, Five Cargoes
The downriver traders become a small case study in how observers fix different details. Gass calls them simply “An Indian man and a squaw” with “two canoes, loaded with fur and peltry.” Ordway converts them into “Several Frenchman” and drops the Indigenous occupants entirely. Whitehouse splits the difference — “a frenchman and 2 Indians on board” — with cargo described as “beaver Skins and other peltry.” Floyd is the most specific about the freight:
one perogue Loaded with Bare Skins and Beav[er] and Deer Skins from the osoge village one osoge woman with them
Clark, writing at greatest length, supplies the fullest manifest: “a Cajaux of Bear Skins and pelteries came down from the Grand Osarge, one french man one Indian, and a Squar.” The variance in passenger counts (one Indian, two Indians, none) within a single afternoon’s encounter is a useful reminder of how unreliable the supporting journals can be on small numerical details, even when the men were standing on the same bank.
What Only Clark Recorded
The traders carried more than pelts. Clark alone reports that they bore letters from Pierre Chouteau’s emissary to the Arkansas-River band of the Osage, and that the news was bad:
mentioning that his letter was Commited to the flaims, the Inds. not believeing that the Americans had possession of the Countrey they disregarded St Louis & their Supplies &c.
This is a substantive intelligence report — an early, concrete instance of Indigenous skepticism about the Louisiana Purchase being communicated back to the expedition before it had even cleared the lower Missouri. Gass, Ordway, Whitehouse, and Floyd preserve none of it. The pattern is consistent with their roles: the sergeants and privates record the camp’s physical conditions, while Clark, as co-commander, records what the camp learned. A reader working only from the enlisted journals would never know that May 31 produced diplomatic news at all.
Clark also notes two further items absent elsewhere: “Several rats of Considerable Size was Cought in the woods to day,” and the fact that “Capt Lewis went out to the woods & found many curious Plants & Srubs.” The latter is one of the small offhand glimpses of Lewis’s botanical work during a stretch when Lewis himself was not keeping a daily journal — the detail survives only because Clark mentioned his colleague’s whereabouts.
Floyd’s Resigned Shrug
Floyd’s entry is worth isolating for its tone. After cataloging the pirogue, the deer, the wind delay, and the terrain (“the Land is Good but Broken”), he closes:
it Rained and Cleard up nothing worth Relating to day
The line is characteristic of Floyd, who would die just under three months later and whose journal frequently registers a private’s view that wind-bound camp days produced nothing of consequence. The irony is sharp against Clark’s entry: from Floyd’s vantage the day held “nothing worth Relating,” yet the same twenty-four hours preserved an early signal that American sovereignty over the Missouri country was, in Osage estimation, not yet a fact.
The Whitehouse-Ordway relationship — often a near-copying pattern later in the journey — is not yet pronounced here. Whitehouse’s “high wind” and “R. Fields killed a deer” echo Ordway’s phrasing, but Whitehouse adds the morning weather (“a fair morning”) and the unusual claim that the party “Set out as usal and proceeS on,” which contradicts every other narrator’s account of a wind-bound layover. Whether this reflects a genuine brief movement, a misdated entry, or simple carelessness is unclear from the entry alone.
