The expedition’s camp near the mouth of the Little Sioux River on August 17, 1804, produced an unusually rich documentary record. Four narrators — William Clark, John Ordway, Joseph Whitehouse, and Charles Floyd — committed the day to paper, and their entries, read together, expose the layered hierarchy of observation aboard the Corps of Discovery. The men were waiting: George Drouillard and a small party had been dispatched to retrieve deserters Moses Reed and La Liberté, and to escort Oto chiefs back to a council. Until that party returned, the camp’s work was reduced to maintenance and waiting.
The Same Afternoon, Four Registers
Clark, as commanding officer and principal scientist of the day, produces by far the longest entry — and notably writes it twice, in slightly different versions. He opens not with the deserter drama but with a survey memorandum and a botanical inventory, cataloguing four grasses he has collected:
I Collected a grass much resembling wheet with a grain like Rye, much fuller of grain, one like Rye & one like Barley Grass Small, a Grass like Timothey except the Seed which is on branches from the main Stalk-
Only after the longitude estimate and the grass specimens does Clark turn to the human news: Labiche has come in ahead of the main party to report that Reed has been caught, that La Liberté “decived them and got away,” and that the “Great Chief & 2nd Chief of the ottoes” are accompanying the returning detail with the explicit diplomatic aim of brokering peace with the Maha (Omaha). Clark closes by noting that the prairie was fired as a signal — “the usial Signal” to summon any Maha or Sioux nearby — and adds the day’s two beaver.
Sergeant Ordway compresses the same events into a single sentence of practical reportage. He notes the southeast wind, identifies the men’s labor as “reparing the arms & Cloathing,” and names Labiche as the messenger who “arivd towards evening” with word that “Drewyer & the Zottaus Chiefs was comming near with the Deserter.” Ordway’s spelling of “Zottaus” for Otos is idiosyncratic, but his structural ordering — weather, camp labor, news — is essentially a stripped-down version of Clark’s framework, suggesting either a shared briefing or Ordway’s own settled habit of mirroring his captain’s outline.
Private Whitehouse copies Ordway almost phrase for phrase: “the men Ocepyed their time in Cam[p] Repairing their Arms, and Cloathing.” He renders the messenger’s name as “LaeBash” and adds a small detail Ordway omits — that Labiche “Lost the Party” before reaching camp alone. Whether this is independent observation or a fragment overheard from the messenger himself, it is the kind of granular human detail that the enlisted journals occasionally preserve where the officers’ entries flatten the report into outcome.
Floyd’s Foreshortened Entry
Sergeant Charles Floyd’s entry for the seventeenth is the briefest of all, and it reads now with unavoidable poignancy. He records only:
Continued Hear for ouer men thay did not Return Last night
His next dated entry — “Satturday augt 18” — notes the return of the men with the Oto chiefs. Floyd’s journal then breaks off into a fly-leaf list of names and guard-duty assignments. As the editorial footnote in the published edition observes, on August 19 Floyd was “taken verry bad all at once with a Biliose Chorlick,” and on the twentieth he died. The thinness of his August 17 entry, set beside Clark’s botanizing and Ordway’s orderly summary, is a reminder that the journals are not uniform witnesses: illness, fatigue, and rank all shape what gets written down.
What the Cross-Reading Reveals
Three patterns emerge. First, Ordway and Whitehouse track each other closely on camp routine — arms, clothing, weather — confirming the well-documented dependence of Whitehouse’s journal on Ordway’s. Second, Clark alone records the diplomatic substance: that the Oto chiefs are traveling with the party specifically to negotiate peace with the Maha, and that the prairie burning is a deliberate signal rather than an incidental fire. Neither sergeant nor private mentions either fact. Third, Whitehouse’s small notation that Labiche became separated from his detail preserves a human texture absent from Ordway’s cleaner sentence. Read singly, each entry is partial; read together, they restore the camp on the Missouri to something closer to its full dimension — botanical, diplomatic, laborious, and, in Floyd’s case, already shadowed.
