The entry for August 11, 1804 captures one of the more deliberate ceremonial gestures of the expedition’s early months: the ascent of a high bluff above the Missouri to the burial mound of Blackbird, the recently deceased chief of the Omahas (Mahas). Both Patrick Gass and William Clark record the visit, but the texture of their accounts differs sharply — Clark writing as the participant-surveyor, Gass distilling the event into a compact biographical sketch.
Clark’s Eyewitness Detail
Clark provides two overlapping versions of the day, both rich in topographical specifics. He notes the predawn weather — “about day this morning a hard wind from the N. W. followed by rain” — before describing the landing and ascent. The grave itself receives careful measurement: a mound “about 12 foot Base & circueller,” raised “on the top of a Penical about 300 foot above the water of the river.” In his second version Clark is even more precise, giving the mound’s height as six feet, turfed, with “a pole 8 feet high in the Center.”
The flag-placing is rendered as a collective ceremonial act:
Capt. Lewis myself & 10 men assended the Hill on the L. S. under which there was Some fine Springs to the top of a high point where the Mahars King Black Bird was burried 4 years ago… on this pole we fixed a white flage bound with red Blue & white
Clark also documents the surrounding country with a surveyor’s eye: the soft yellow sandstone bluffs of “Various hight from 40 to 150 feet,” the meandering river visible “for 60 or 70 Miles,” and the channels where the river “has onced run and now filled or filling up & growing with willows & cottonwood.” He records the latitude observation — 42° 1′ 3″ 8/10 N — and notes a lunar distance from the sun. The creek below the bluff he names in transliterated Omaha, “Wau can di Peeche,” glossing it as “Great Spirrit is bad,” and links the place to the smallpox epidemic that killed roughly 400 Omahas four years earlier.
Gass’s Compression and Editorial Framing
Gass, working from notes that would later be edited for publication, condenses the entire episode into a few sentences. He omits the ascent, the springs, the measurements, the sandstone, and the smallpox creek. What he preserves is the human story:
an Indian chief had been buried, and placed a flag upon a pole, which had been set up at his grave. His name was Blackbird, king of the Mahas; an absolute monarch while living, and the Indians suppose can exercise the power of one though dead.
The phrasing here is markedly literary. Where Clark writes “the late King of the mahar,” Gass elevates Blackbird to “an absolute monarch” and adds the ethnographic claim — absent from Clark’s entry — that the Omahas believed Blackbird could still exercise sovereign power posthumously. Whether this gloss originates with Gass himself or with his editor David McKeehan is a known problem in Gass scholarship; the polished cadence (“an absolute monarch while living”) suggests editorial smoothing.
Gass also closes with the same astronomical observation Clark recorded — “latitude 42d. 1m. 3s. .3, as ascertained by observation” — confirming that the figure circulated among the men or was copied from the captains’ notes. This is one of many instances where Gass’s published journal carries scientific data he is unlikely to have computed himself.
What Each Narrator Preserves
The pairing illustrates a recurring pattern in the early Missouri journals. Clark records the physical and procedural reality: who climbed, what was built, how high, how wide, what could be seen, what the place was called in the local language, and the demographic catastrophe of the smallpox epidemic. Gass records the symbolic reality: a king, a grave, a flag, and a belief about power surviving death. Neither account is complete without the other. Clark’s mound is twelve feet across and turfed; Gass’s Blackbird is a sovereign whose authority outlasts him. The visit on August 11 is both — a measured bluff above a meandering river, and a deliberate diplomatic gesture toward a nation the expedition had not yet met.
