The June 12, 1804 entries center on a single chance meeting: somewhere below the Grand River, the upbound expedition intercepted a small flotilla of pirogues drifting down from the Sioux country, loaded with the previous winter’s returns. Out of that encounter came one of the expedition’s most consequential recruitments — the old French trader Pierre Dorion, who would become the captains’ bridge to the Yankton Sioux. All five narrators record the meeting, but the details they each preserve diverge sharply, and the composite picture is richer than any single journal.
Counting the Pirogues, Naming the Cargo
The simplest discrepancy is arithmetic. Whitehouse counts
7 peirogues. Loaded with peltry for Cap” Chatto [Chouteau] in St Louis
and routes them to a specific St. Louis consignee. Gass and Ordway both say five. Floyd also says
5 Cannoes from the Soux nations Loaded with peltry and Greece
, and adds the duration — the traders
have been 13 mounthes up the missorea River
. Clark, in his field notes, writes only of
2 Caussease
coming down, then in his fair-copy entry confirms
two Chaussies one Loaded with furs & Pelteries, the other with Greece buffalow grease & tallow
. The likeliest reconciliation is that Clark’s two principal craft were accompanied by smaller boats the enlisted men counted differently — but the captains’ interest was in the two cargo vessels they actually transacted with.
The cargo itself is rendered with revealing variation. Ordway alone romanticizes the haul as
an emence Site of BufTaloe Green Skins
. Floyd and Clark both fix on the buffalo grease as the commercially interesting commodity, with Clark precisely noting
purchased 300 lb. of Voyagers Grece @ 5$ Hd.
— a figure Floyd does not have and Ordway omits entirely. Whitehouse, characteristically focused on the enlisted men’s experience, records that
Our men of Each Craft Exchang* Blankets for Buffalow Robes & Mockisons
, the only narrator to describe the rank-and-file barter alongside the officers’ bulk purchase.
Who Dorion Was, and Why He Mattered
The recruitment of Pierre Dorion is where the cross-narrator record becomes most useful. Gass gives the bare functional description:
an old Frenchman, who could speak the languages of the different nations of Indians up the Missouri, and who agreed to go with us as an interpreter
. Ordway echoes this almost verbatim —
an old Frenchman to go with us which could Speak Several languages
— a recurrence consistent with the documented pattern of overlap between the two sergeants’ phrasings. Floyd offers the same kernel in cruder spelling.
Only Clark explains the strategic calculation. Dorion is not merely an interpreter of opportunity; he is a known quantity with deep credit among the Sioux:
we found in the party an old man who had been with the Soux 20 years & had great influence with them, we provld. on this old man Mr. Duriaur to return with us, with a view to get Some of the Soux Chiefs to go to the U. S.
The fair copy elaborates the diplomatic plan — Dorion is to
get some of their Chiefs to Visit the Presdt.
The enlisted journalists saw a useful linguist; Clark saw the first practical instrument of the expedition’s diplomatic mission to the Sioux. The decision to camp early — Clark admits they
questioned him untill it was too late to Go further
— reflects how immediately the captains grasped what they had stumbled onto.
The Conflated Day
A bibliographic note: Whitehouse, Floyd, and parts of Whitehouse’s manuscript run the June 12 and June 13 entries together on the page, with Whitehouse’s June 13 describing the barge striking a sandbar and the arrival at the Grand River. Floyd similarly appends his June 13 below the 12th, recording the prairie where
antient Missourue Indianes had a village at this place 300 of them were Killed by the Saukees in former times
— a piece of regional ethnohistory none of the other June 12 entries carry, and which properly belongs to the next day’s analysis. The cross-narrator record for June 12 itself is the meeting, the grease, and Dorion. Each man saw the encounter through his own frame: Gass and Ordway as a logistical hire, Floyd as a quartermaster’s transaction, Whitehouse as an opportunity for the men, and Clark as the opening move of an Indian policy.
