The expedition’s progress on September 1, 1804, from the vicinity of Calumet Bluff to a camp at the lower point of Bon Homme Island, is documented by four narrators: Captain William Clark, Sergeants Patrick Gass and John Ordway, and Private Joseph Whitehouse. The day’s events were modest — a forgotten kettle returned to the interpreter Pierre Dorion, a hard headwind that forced an early halt, several elk killed, and a fruitless excursion by the captains to find a reputed beaver house — yet the four accounts diverge revealingly in what each narrator chooses to elevate.
The Kettle, the Wind, and the Beaver House
All four journalists open with the previous night’s storm and the early departure, but only Clark and Ordway record the small courtesy that began the morning: returning Dorion’s forgotten tin kettle. Ordway adds a homely detail Clark omits — that the party also sent along
“2 fish with it”
— a touch consistent with his frequent attention to small acts of provisioning and exchange.
The afternoon’s signal episode is the captains’ attempt to locate a beaver house said to shelter, in Ordway’s telling,
“about 3 hundred Beaver or more, as they amagine in the pond.”
Clark’s two parallel field entries both confess the failure plainly:
“we could not find the Pon.”
Ordway, writing from the boat’s perspective, supplies the explanation Clark does not — that the party
“had passed it some distance”
before the captains set out. Gass and Whitehouse omit the beaver-house excursion entirely, suggesting that for the enlisted men below decks the captains’ side trip was either unremarkable or unobserved.
The Earthwork: Gass and Whitehouse Diverge from the Captains
The most striking cross-narrator pattern of the day concerns an earthwork on the north bank that Clark, in the entries reproduced here, does not describe at all. Gass devotes his most detailed passage to it, calling it
“an ancient fortification or breastwork, similar to those which have been occasionally discovered on the western waters,”
and supplying measurements:
“the outside, which is 2500 yards in length, parallel to it: there is no breastwork thrown up next to the river.”
Whitehouse independently notices the same feature but renders it differently —
“an ancient fortification in the form of a half moon it appeared that one Side had washed in to the river”
— and credits Clark with taking the dimensions:
“Cap.t Clark took the dimentions of it.”
Whitehouse’s note implies that Clark’s fuller field measurements existed in a notebook not represented in the entries excerpted above, and that Gass’s specific figure of 2500 yards likely derives from the same captain’s survey rather than independent measurement. The half-moon shape Whitehouse reports is not obviously reconcilable with Gass’s description of two ends running at right angles to the river — a divergence that suggests each sergeant or private was working from impression and partial conversation rather than from a shared written source.
Register and Geographic Detail
Ordway’s entry is the day’s richest in geographic specificity. He alone names
“a white clift called the den of the White Bear,”
describes its
“ragged round knobs,”
and catalogs the bottomland timber as
“Cottonwood Elm oak &.C.”
Clark, in his second field draft, picks up the same toponym and supplies the etymology Ordway leaves implicit: the clay bluff is called White Bear Cliff
“one of those animals haveing been killed in a whole in it.”
The two accounts are mutually reinforcing without being textually dependent — Ordway gives the visible holes, Clark the explanatory anecdote.
Whitehouse’s register is the most compressed and the most domestic: where Ordway tracks river miles and Gass tallies elk (three on the island, one above the breakfast halt), Whitehouse closes with the practical compensations of being wind-bound —
“a high prarie where we found plumbs & Grapes a pleanty.”
Clark, characteristically, ends with a fisheries note of striking confidence:
“those fish is so plenty that we catch them at any time and place in the river.”
Taken together, the four entries for September 1 demonstrate how the expedition’s documentary record is built from layered observation: Clark’s surveying eye, Ordway’s sustained topographic narration, Gass’s antiquarian interest in the prehistoric earthwork, and Whitehouse’s terser ground-level summary. Where one narrator falls silent — Clark on the fortification, the enlisted men on the beaver-house excursion — another fills the gap.
