The expedition spent June 10, 1805 at the junction of the Marias and Missouri, preparing to push up the southern fork that Lewis and Clark had concluded was the true Missouri. The day’s labor was almost entirely logistical: drying baggage, burying stores, hiding the red pirogue, and reapportioning loads among the remaining craft. All five journal-keepers describe the same sequence of events, yet the entries differ sharply in what each man chose to itemize.
The Inventory Problem
Lewis produces by far the most exhaustive manifest of what went into the cache. He lists
2 best falling axes, one auger, a set of plains, some files, blacksmiths bellowses and hammers Stake tongs &c. 1 Keg of flour, 2 Kegs of parched meal, 2 Kegs of Pork, 1 Keg of salt, some chissels, a cooper’s Howel, some tin cups, 2 Musquets, 3 brown bear skins, beaver skins, horns of the bighorned anamal, a part of the men’s robes clothing and all their superfluous baggage of every discription, and beaver traps.
Clark, characteristically, condenses the same event to a navigational shorthand — "burry Some Powder & lead in the point, Some Lead a canister of Powder & an ax in a thicket in the point at Some distance" — and notes the upland cache "1 mile up S. S." Gass collapses the inventory still further to a weight: "about one thousand pounds weight." Where Lewis catalogs by object and Clark by location, Gass reduces the whole enterprise to tonnage relieved from the boats.
Ordway and Whitehouse, the enlisted diarists, focus on the labor rather than the contents. Both record the towing line being made for the white pirogue, the blacksmiths repairing the air gun and other firearms, and the branding of trees. Whitehouse adds a tactical detail the officers omit: the men dug
another hole So that we might bury in different places what we left So that if the Savages Should find one perhaps they would not find the other & we would have Some left Still.
This is the rationale behind the dispersed caches Clark and Lewis simply list as fact. Whitehouse preserves the reasoning; the captains preserve the geometry.
Shields, the Air Gun, and Sacagawea
Three narrators mention the air-gun repair, but only Lewis turns it into a character sketch. Ordway notes flatly that "the blacksmiths fixed up their bellowes & repaired the air gun." Whitehouse specifies that the smiths "made a main Spring to Cap! [Lewis’s] air Gun, as the one belonging to it got broke." Lewis names the man and editorializes:
Shields renewed the main Spring of my air gun we have been much indebted to the ingenuity of this man on many occasions; without having served any regular apprenticeship to any trade, he makes his own tools principally and works extreemly well in either wood or metal.
The Whitehouse and Ordway entries here show their usual close parallel — both mention the bellows, both mention the air gun, both place the shower at "about 4 oClock P.M." with the evening turning "pleasant" — consistent with the documented pattern of Whitehouse drawing on Ordway’s text.
Sacagawea’s worsening illness appears in three of the five entries. Ordway: "Sah-cah-gah our Indian woman verry Sick & was bled." Lewis and Clark both record the bleeding; Clark, who performed it, writes simply "I blead her." Gass and Whitehouse omit her entirely. The omission is telling: from the enlisted ranks, Ordway noticed; Whitehouse, working largely from Ordway, did not carry the detail forward, suggesting Whitehouse drafted his entry before Ordway’s became available or selected against it.
The Decision to Split the Party
The most consequential item in the day’s record — that Lewis would push ahead overland with four men toward the snow-capped mountains while Clark finished the cache and followed by water — appears with varying weight. Clark frames it as a joint determination: "we deturmined to assend the South fork, and one of us, Capt. Lewis or My self to go by land… Capt Lewis inclines to go by land on this expedition." Lewis names his detachment — "Drewyer, Joseph Fields, Gibson and Goodrich" — and admits, in a rare concession, "I still feel myself somewhat unwell with the disentary, but determined to set out in the morning." Ordway captures the plan in a single line about going "to the South Mountain & See the course of the River." Gass and Whitehouse do not mention the split at all.
The cross-narrator record for June 10 thus distributes itself along predictable lines: Lewis writes the inventory and the natural-history postscript (a small unfamiliar bird, described in the closing fragment); Clark writes the map; Ordway writes the work order; Whitehouse echoes Ordway but adds the tactical reasoning behind the dispersed caches; Gass reduces everything to a number. Read together, they reconstruct a day in which the expedition deliberately made itself smaller in order to move faster.
