The journals of May 19, 1804, capture a single afternoon at St. Charles from four vantage points. The expedition is poised to ascend the Missouri in earnest, and Meriwether Lewis — delayed by business in St. Louis — finally rejoins William Clark and the men who have been encamped on the riverbank for nearly a week. The four surviving entries for this date are remarkably uneven in length and focus, and the contrasts between them illuminate how each narrator understood his task.
Four Registers of the Same Arrival
Sergeant Charles Floyd, characteristically spare, compresses the day into a single line:
a Rainey day Capt Lewis Joined us
Floyd’s entry establishes the two facts the enlisted men evidently considered worth preserving: weather and the captain’s arrival. Sergeant John Ordway, often the most procedurally minded of the noncommissioned diarists, supplies what Floyd omits — the names of those who accompanied Lewis. Ordway records that Cap.t Stoddard & Sergts Worrell came with him,
identifying Captain Amos Stoddard, the U.S. officer who had formally accepted Upper Louisiana from Spanish authorities only weeks earlier. Ordway alone names the visiting party, a habit consistent with his role keeping the daily detail.
Private Joseph Whitehouse expands slightly on both. He notes a rainy wet morning
and that Cap.t Lewis and Some of the officers from S.t Louis arived here this afternoon,
adding the operational note that we made ready for a Start &c.
Whitehouse’s phrasing — vague on identities but clear on the camp’s anticipation of departure — reflects the perspective of a private looking outward at the journey ahead rather than inward at the command structure.
Clark’s Crowded Day
William Clark’s two parallel entries — a field note and a fuller journal version — dwarf the others in length and register a wholly different layer of activity. Where the enlisted men report rain, Clark specifies its origin and duration:
A Violent Wind last night from the W. S. W. accompanied with rain which lasted about three hours Cleared away this morn’g at 8 oClock
He took equal altitudes, settled accounts with the men and take receipts for Pay up to the 1st of Dec.r next,
received George Drouillard returning from St. Louis with ninety-nine dollars (Drouillard having lost a letter from Cap.t Lewis to me
), noted that Reubin Field killed a deer, and fielded a stream of visitors — many persons Came to the boat to day
in the field note, refined to Seven Ladies visit me to day
in the journal version. He also received an invitation to a ball in the village. The two versions diverge here in a telling way: in the field note Clark writes that he let Several of the men go,
while in the recopied journal he records only that it is not in my power to go.
The field note preserves the immediate decision; the journal flattens it into a polite refusal.
Beneath the administrative detail Clark allows a rare personal note: I heard of my Brothers illness to day which has given me much Concurn.
This sentence appears only in the field note and was excised from the recopied journal — an instructive example of how Clark filtered private feeling out of the version he intended for posterity.
What the Comparison Reveals
Floyd, Ordway, and Whitehouse, all writing as subordinates, frame the day around Lewis’s arrival. None mentions the pay settlement, the visitors, Drouillard’s return, the lost letter, or Reuben Field’s deer — events that occupied much of Clark’s day as commanding officer in camp. Conversely, Clark does not record Lewis’s arrival in either of his entries for the 19th, presumably because he expected to note it in conjunction with the next day’s preparations. The result is that no single journal preserves the full day; only by reading the four together does the texture of St. Charles on the eve of departure emerge — a wet, sociable, administratively busy Saturday in which the captain rejoined his command, the men accepted their pay, and Clark quietly absorbed troubling news from home.
