The journal entries for October 6, 1804, offer an unusually clear case study in how four members of the Corps of Discovery processed the same encounter. Patrick Gass, John Ordway, Joseph Whitehouse, and William Clark all describe passing an abandoned Arikara (“Rickree” or “Ricara”) village on the Missouri’s south side, yet each narrator selects, omits, and frames the scene differently.
Convergent Observations, Divergent Detail
All four journals agree on the day’s basic shape: a clear, cool morning with a north wind; passage along timbered bottoms; the discovery of an abandoned Arikara village with earthen lodges, bull-boats, and squashes; an elk killed by one of the hunters; and a camp on a sand beach (or sand bar) on the north side near the mouth of what Clark names Otter Creek.
Clark, as commander and principal cartographer, supplies the most rigorous description of the village itself:
passed a village of about 80 neet Lodges covered with earth and picketed around, those loges are Spicious of an Octagon form as close together as they can possibly be placed
Clark counts the lodges (eighty), measures their diameters (“20 to 60 feet”), and identifies their geometry as octagonal. He also reasons forensically about the date of abandonment, concluding from the canoes, mats, and buckets left behind that the inhabitants “appear to have been inhabited last Spring.” Ordway, by contrast, dates the departure differently — “the RickRee left it last Spring” matches Clark, but Gass writes that the band “lived last winter,” a discrepancy the narrators do not reconcile among themselves.
Register and Borrowing Among the Sergeants
The closeness of phrasing among Gass, Ordway, and Whitehouse suggests the familiar pattern of mutual consultation among the enlisted journal-keepers. Compare Gass —
They had left a number of round huts covered with earth, some of their water craft made of buffaloe hides, and some garden truck, such as squashes.
— with Whitehouse:
they left a nomber of round huts covered with earth, and Some water-crafts made out of buffaloe hides.
The phrasing is nearly identical, though Whitehouse drops the squashes that Gass, Ordway, and Clark all mention. Whitehouse’s entry is the briefest of the four — a compressed précis that records the day’s outline without the texture supplied by the others. Gass adds a homely touch absent elsewhere with his phrase “garden truck,” a vernacular register that distinguishes his published account from Clark’s more administrative prose.
Ordway is the most ethnographically curious of the sergeants. He alone notes that the bull-boats “would carry 2 men & considerable baggage,” and he alone records that the party actively collected souvenirs: “we took Several of them & Some of the Squashes.” Ordway also tracks Lewis’s movements with characteristic attentiveness — “Capt Lewis & one hunter went out hunting” and later “Capt Lewis & the hunter joined us. brought no Game with them” — a detail entirely absent from Gass and Whitehouse.
What Only Clark Sees
Several observations appear in Clark’s journal alone. He notes the “many large round Stones near the middle of the River” and speculates that they “appear to have been washed from the hills.” He records the navigational struggle of dragging the boat over sand bars to avoid backtracking “a league” — a logistical concern absent from the sergeants’ entries, which simply say the party “proceeded on.” Clark also offers the day’s only natural-history vignette:
I saw 2 wolves in persute of another which appeared to be wounded and nearly tired
And he is alone in noting the abundance of magpies (“The Corvos or Magpye is verry Common in this quarter”) and the relative scarcity of gulls and plovers — comparative observations that reflect his role as the expedition’s working naturalist alongside Lewis.
The four entries together demonstrate how the expedition’s documentary record was built in layers: Clark’s measured ethnographic and ecological detail; Ordway’s middle-register attentiveness to officers and artifacts; Gass’s plainspoken summary later polished for publication; and Whitehouse’s compressed daily minimum. No single journal preserves the full day, but read against one another they reconstruct it.
