The entries for September 2, 1804, written as the expedition camped opposite present-day Bonhomme Island on the Missouri, offer an unusually clear demonstration of how the Corps’ three journal-keepers for the day handled the same set of events. A cold northwest wind, a successful elk hunt, and Captain Clark’s lengthy survey of a supposed ancient fortification dominate the day. Yet the three narrators — William Clark, John Ordway, and Joseph Whitehouse — record these events at vastly different scales and registers.
Three Scales of Attention
Whitehouse’s entry is the briefest the database holds for this date — a four-line itinerary noting the morning departure, a yellow bluff, beaver signs, a chalk bluff, plum creek, and the night’s camp:
cool and pleasant this morning we Set off at Sun rise passed yallow Bluff & many beaver Signs we passed a Chalk Bluff we passed plumb Creek on the N. S. Camped on the S. S.
Whitehouse omits the elk hunt, the fortification, and the storm entirely. His entry functions as a navigational log, and his "cool and pleasant" reading of the weather contradicts both Ordway and Clark, who emphasize cold wind and rain. The discrepancy suggests Whitehouse may have written from morning impressions only.
Ordway, by contrast, produces a full narrative day. He opens with the previous night’s storm — "past 1 oC. of wind & rain from N. W. which lasted ab° 2 hours" — and tracks the shifting wind hour by hour. He attends to the hunters by name, recording that "R. Fields killed one Buck Elk, and Drewyer killed 2 Elk & Newman & Howard killed one on the opposite Shore." Ordway also captures something neither captain nor private records: the human texture of the hunt, with hunters hollering "from the Island for help to bring in their Game."
Clark the Surveyor
Clark’s entry splits cleanly into two registers. His narrative paragraph parallels Ordway’s content closely — the same four hunters, four elk, jerked meat, skins stretched to cover the pirogues — but adds the detail that Shannon, lost since late August, "has not yet joind us." Clark also notes botanical observations Ordway misses: "I observe Bear grass & Rhue in the Sides of the hills."
The remainder of Clark’s entry is a technical survey of the fortification that Ordway describes only generally. Where Ordway writes that the entrenchment "formed a Circle from the river in the form of a half moon" and is "more than a mile & half in length," Clark produces a chained traverse with bearings and distances:
first Corse is from the river is S 76° W 96 yards. S 84° W. 53 yds. at this angle a kind of ravilene covering a Saleport, bearing East widing N 69 W 300 yds. passed a gate way at 280 yds.
Clark identifies architectural features — ravelins, sally ports, a glacis, gate-covering wings, ovoid mounds — using the vocabulary of European military fortification. He also gathers comparative ethnographic intelligence, noting that "the inteperter & french" have seen "numbers of those fortifications in different parts of this Cty. pirtcularly on the Platt Kansies and the North of this place on the river Jacque."
Modern geological assessment, as the editorial note in Ordway’s text records, has concluded that the "supposed earthworks were in fact only natural formations made by the drifting sand." Clark’s careful angles and distances thus document a misreading — but the misreading itself is revealing. Clark perceives the landscape through a fortification grammar, and his French interpreters confirm the framework by reporting similar "works" elsewhere.
Patterns of Dependency and Independence
Ordway’s account of the fortification — particularly the detail that "Some places remains yet 5 feet high" and that "Some Trees Stands on the works" — appears to derive from Clark’s verbal report when the captain "returned to the Boat, & Informed us." Ordway explicitly attributes the information this way, distinguishing his own observation (the plum orchards, the grape abundance, the breakfast halt) from secondhand summary. This is one of the cleaner instances in the journals where Ordway names his source rather than silently absorbing the captain’s data.
Ordway also adds a reflection absent from Clark: "we Scarcely passed a day as yet on the Missouri, in the time or Season of them but what we found them in great abundance" — a generalizing observation about plums and grapes that Clark, focused on his survey, does not make. The pattern across these three entries suggests a working division: Whitehouse logs the route, Ordway narrates the day, and Clark measures the anomaly.
