The expedition’s encampment near the ruins of the Omaha (Maha) village on August 14, 1804, produced one of the more revealing single-day clusters in the early journals. Four narrators — Patrick Gass, Joseph Whitehouse, Charles Floyd, and William Clark — all record the same set of facts: a scouting party sent to find the Omahas had returned empty-handed, the deserter Moses Reed had not yet been brought back, hunters found no game, and Clark led a fishing expedition to a nearby pond. Yet the four entries diverge sharply in scale, register, and ethnographic ambition.
Parallel Facts, Divergent Registers
Gass, ever the carpenter-sergeant, compresses the day into three sentences. He notes the failed search, the unsuccessful hunt, and a single practical accomplishment:
While at this place we provided ourselves with a new mast.
That detail — the replacement mast for the keelboat — appears in none of the other three journals for this date, a reminder that Gass consistently catches the material and mechanical labor that his officers omit.
Whitehouse and Floyd, by contrast, both fold August 14 and 15 together, and both fixate on the fish. Whitehouse reports that Clark and his men "catch’d 386 fish"; Floyd, writing the same episode, gives the figure as "300 and 17 fish of Difernt Coindes." The discrepancy is characteristic. Enlisted-men’s journals frequently disagree on quantities while agreeing on the event, suggesting that numbers circulated orally around the camp and were written down from memory rather than copied from a shared tally. Floyd’s interest in "Difernt Coindes" — different kinds — is his own ichthyological flourish, absent from Whitehouse.
Clark’s Ethnographic Expansion
Where the enlisted journals end, Clark’s begins. His field notes give a brief version — "The Situation of this Village, now in ruins Siround by enunbl. hosts of grave" — but his fair-copy entry for the same day expands into a sustained meditation on the smallpox epidemic that had devastated the Omahas roughly four years earlier. Floyd had already captured the bones of this account:
thes Indians has not Live at the town Sence the Smallpoks was so bad abut 4 years ago thay Burnt thare town and onley live about it in the winter
The parallel is close enough to suggest that Floyd either heard Clark discussing the matter or drew on the same informant — likely Pierre Dorion or one of the engagés. But Clark goes much further, offering numbers ("400 men & women & Children"), a demographic estimate of survivors ("not exceeding 300 men"), and a harrowing claim that the dying Omahas:
put their wives & Children to Death with a view of their all going together to Some better Countrey
This passage has no analog in Gass, Whitehouse, or Floyd. Whether the report reflects accurate testimony, French-trader rumor, or Clark’s interpretive embellishment is a question scholars continue to debate; what is clear is that Clark alone among the day’s narrators treats the empty village as a subject for extended reflection rather than a passing landmark.
What Each Narrator Misses
The cross-narrator pattern for August 14 is instructive. Gass alone records the new mast. Whitehouse and Floyd alone preserve the fish counts (and disagree on them). Floyd alone notes the detail that the Otoes raid Omaha cornfields while their owners are on the buffalo hunt — an observation about intertribal relations that Clark, surprisingly, omits from his longer account. Clark alone develops the smallpox narrative at length, and Clark alone takes celestial observations ("Time and Distance of the Sun & Moon") at the Fish Camp.
The day demonstrates a recurring division of attention in the journals: Gass attends to ship and tools, the enlisted men to food and numbers, and Clark to landscape, demography, and ceremony. None of the four entries on its own gives an adequate account of August 14, 1804. Read together, they sketch a Corps suspended between tasks — waiting for the deserter party, waiting for the Omahas who would not come, and filling the interval with fish, repairs, and Clark’s long contemplation of a burned town and its graves.
