The first of June, 1804, brought the expedition to the mouth of the Osage River, a confluence significant enough that the captains halted to take celestial observations. Five of the journal-keepers recorded the day, and the resulting overlap offers an unusually clear test of how each narrator handled a single, shared event.
The Same River, Five Widths
The most striking divergence is quantitative. Gass records the Osage as
197 yards wide at its confluence with the Missouri, which, at this place, is 875 yards broad.
Floyd, writing the same day, gives the Missouri at the same 875 yards but the Osage at
397 yardes wide
— a 200-yard discrepancy with Gass that almost certainly reflects a transcription slip in one of the two journals rather than independent measurement, since neither man was running the survey. Clark, who was running it, gives no width figure in the entry preserved here, only his compass courses (
S 48° W
,
S. 45°W
,
S 39° W
) and the cumulative mileage. Ordway and Whitehouse give no widths at all. The numbers that later readers cite as authoritative thus enter the record through the sergeants, not the captains.
What Each Narrator Chose to Preserve
Clark’s two versions of the entry are the briefest in narrative content but the densest in navigation: bearings, distances, the falling banks, the head wind from the west, and the note that he
Sit up untill 1 oClock to take Som observations
— a detail his second draft revises to
Sit up untill 12 oClock
. The hour matters less than the labor it documents: a captain working past midnight at a river junction.
Ordway is characteristically terse, noting only that the party
fell a nomber of Trees in the Point for the Captains to Take observations
. Whitehouse is shorter still, breaking off after Bear Creek and omitting the Osage arrival entirely — and notably mis-naming Bear Creek as
beaver creek
, a slip that suggests he was writing from memory or from a hurried hearing rather than copying Ordway directly on this date.
Floyd, by contrast, produces the longest and most observational entry of the enlisted men. He alone describes the topography of the point itself:
a Butifull pint Betwen the two Rivers hills in the pints in about a mile Betwen the two the Second Bank is high at the mouth of this River
, and notes
a Butifull Is* Jest Below the pint
. He also folds June 2 into the same entry under a misdated heading (
Saterday Fune 22 1804
), recording the layover, the four deer killed, the lick on the south side, and the return of the two men who had been driving the horses overland for eight days.
Gass as Ethnographer
Gass is the only narrator on this date who looks past the geography to the people whose river this was. He records that
The Osage nation of Indians live about two hundred miles up this river. They are of a large size and well proportioned, and a very warlike people.
None of the others mentions the Osage at all — the river is, for Clark, Ordway, Whitehouse, and Floyd, a hydrographic feature and a survey point. Gass alone treats the name as a referent to a nation. He also alone records the routine but consequential detail that
Our arms and ammunition were all inspected here and found in good order
— a note Floyd echoes in shorter form (
armes inspected all in Good order
) but which neither captain enters.
The pattern across the five entries is consistent with what emerges on other early-Missouri dates: Clark carries the survey, Ordway carries the skeleton chronology, Whitehouse abbreviates and occasionally garbles, Floyd writes with surprising topographic eye for an enlisted man, and Gass — whose journal was published earliest and edited most heavily — supplies the ethnographic and administrative context the others omit. The Osage confluence is preserved in the composite, not in any single voice.
