June 18, 1804 was a stationary day on the Missouri near the future site of Boonville, Missouri. The expedition had halted to repair rigging damaged in earlier days, and rain made the camp itself the day’s principal subject. Five narrators recorded the day, and the convergence of their accounts on a small set of facts — five deer, one bear, oars and ropes finished — makes the divergences unusually legible.
A Shared Tally, A Single Hunter Named
Every narrator records the hunt’s results, but only Whitehouse and Clark name the bear’s killer. Whitehouse writes that
the hunters Kill* four deer and Colter one large Bare On the west Side of the River
and Clark, in both of his entries for the day, credits
Coltr a Bear, which verry large & fat
. Gass and Ordway report the same kills anonymously; Floyd flattens the event further to
ouer hunters Killed one Bar 5 Deer nothing worth Relating
. The attribution to John Colter survives, then, only because two of the five writers bothered with it — a reminder of how thin the thread of individual credit can be in the expedition record.
The river-bank confusion is also worth noting. Whitehouse places the hunt on the “west Side,” Clark on the “L S.” (larboard, i.e., south/left bank ascending), and Ordway on the “South Side.” These are the same bank described under three conventions, a small illustration of how the journals’ geographic vocabulary was not yet standardized this early in the voyage.
What Only Clark Sees
Beneath the brisk productivity recorded by the enlisted men — Ordway’s oars finished, Whitehouse’s ropes completed, Gass’s neat catalogue of timber (
ash, sugar tree, black walnut, buck-eye, cotton wood
) — Clark alone records the medical condition of the party:
Several men with the Disentary, and two thirds of them with ulsers or Boils, Some with 8 or 10 of those Turners
Two-thirds of the Corps covered in boils is a startling figure, and it appears nowhere else in the day’s record. Floyd, who would himself die of an abdominal complaint less than three months later, writes only “nothing worth Relating.” The contrast is stark: the captain tracks the men’s bodies; the sergeant on the cusp of his own fatal illness does not. Clark closes nonetheless with “Men in Spirits,” a juxtaposition the other journals cannot produce because they have not set up the contrast.
Weather, Work, and Narrative Habit
The rain is universally reported but variously framed. Floyd leads with it (“Clouday with Rain and thunder and wind from the Est”); Whitehouse specifies
In the fore noon thunder and litning Came On After a Rapid Rain
; Clark, characteristically, treats it as an operational problem — “Some hard Showers this morning which delay our work verry much.” Gass, by contrast, omits the weather entirely and devotes his short entry to the landscape, distinguishing the high prairie of the south bank from the level, well-timbered north. Gass’s habit of treating each day as a topographical sketch rather than a log of camp activity is already evident.
Ordway and Whitehouse track each other closely, as is typical: both emphasize the finishing of oars and ropes, both report the hunters’ description of “handsome praries” or good land across the river. Whitehouse’s entry adds the morning storm and Colter’s name; Ordway’s adds the hunters’ verbal report of the country they crossed. The two enlisted journals function here as near-parallel records with small, complementary additions — a pattern that recurs throughout the outbound voyage.
The Bear-Fat Detail
One small datum recurs across three of the five accounts: the bear was fat. Ordway does not say so; Gass does not; Floyd does not. But Whitehouse calls it “large,” Clark twice calls it “verry fat,” and the emphasis matters. Rendered bear fat was both a cooking medium and a mosquito-and-tick salve, and Clark’s same entry notes “the party Drying meat & greesing themselves” while “Mesquetors verry bad.” The fat bear and the greasing party belong to a single sentence of practical logistics that only Clark assembles. Read across all five narrators, June 18 is a maintenance day; read in Clark alone, it is a day of triage.
