The expedition’s arrival at the confluence of the Kansas and Missouri rivers — at the site of present-day Kansas City — produced four enlisted-man journal entries that, read together, illuminate how information circulated within the Corps of Discovery. Patrick Gass, John Ordway, Joseph Whitehouse, and Charles Floyd all recorded the day, but their entries differ markedly in detail, register, and apparent source.
Shared Phrasing and the Question of Copying
Ordway and Floyd produce nearly identical opening sentences, a pattern that recurs frequently in their journals. Floyd writes:
we set out early proceeded on passed a Island on the South Side, back of this Island a large Creek coms in call’d Blue Water Creek (River Le Bleue)
Ordway’s version is almost a verbatim match:
passed an Island on the South Side back of this Island a large Creek comes in called Blue water Creek.
The close correspondence — including the unusual construction “back of this Island” — strongly suggests the two sergeants were sharing notes or working from a common source, possibly Clark’s daily dictation. Gass, by contrast, offers a more polished prose version (“passed a creek on the south side, called Bluewater”), reflecting the editorial smoothing applied when his journal was prepared for publication in 1807. Floyd’s parenthetical French gloss “(River Le Bleue)” is a detail Ordway omits, hinting that Floyd may have been drawing additionally from a French-speaking engagé.
Whitehouse’s Independent Eye
Whitehouse’s entry stands apart. While the others fixate on the Blue Water Creek and the arrival at the Kansas, Whitehouse describes a hunting episode none of the others mention:
Saw 3 deer Swiming Down the River the white peerogue took after them Kill’ the three One of whom Sunk as Soon [as] it Got shot in the head
He also records that the men towed the boat by “Cutting the timber of[f] the Banks” and notes the day “Got mighty hot” — sensory and labor details absent from the other three accounts. Where Ordway flatly notes “the Rope Broak & the Boat Swong But Took no Injury,” Gass elaborates the same incident into a small drama of “exertions” by the crew. Whitehouse passes over the rope incident entirely, suggesting he wrote from his own recollection rather than from any shared communal log.
Whitehouse is also the only narrator to report intelligence about the river’s upper inhabitants, writing of the Kansas tribe that “300 War-riers lives in One Village Up the River About 50 leagues” — information he attributes to “one of our Men that traded Up the River.” This kind of secondhand ethnographic note is characteristic of Whitehouse’s curiosity about Native peoples, a register the more terse Floyd and Ordway rarely adopt.
Measurement, Defense, and Duration
Gass uniquely supplies the river’s measured width — “Canzan or Kanzas, is 230 yards and a quarter wide” — a figure that matches Clark’s own field measurement of 230 yards almost exactly. The correspondence indicates Gass had access to Clark’s surveying notes when later compiling his published narrative. Ordway and Floyd give no width at all; Whitehouse omits the measurement but adds a latitude reading (“Lat? 38° 31′ 13″ N”) taken during the layover.
Only Whitehouse mentions defensive preparations during the two-day halt:
form! a temperery brest work or piq[uet] Least the Savages would Attemp! Comeing in the Night
Gass records merely that the party “pitched our tents and built bowers,” a benign description that omits the fortification entirely. Whether Gass’s later editor softened this detail or Whitehouse exaggerated the threat is unclear, but the divergence shows how individual journalists framed the same encampment in different keys — Gass as restful pause, Whitehouse as wary vigilance.
Floyd’s entry, the briefest of the four, would prove poignant in retrospect: the young sergeant had less than two months to live before his death on August 20, 1804. His laconic note that the hunters “Killed 5 Deer” during the layover stands as one of his characteristic plain-style entries — efficient, unembellished, and focused on the practical accounting of provisions that occupied much of his journal-keeping duty.
