Five journals survive for July 19, 1804, as the expedition pushed up the Missouri toward the Platte’s mouth. The day’s surface events are simple — sand bars, yellow clay clifts, a willow-island camp — but the entries diverge sharply in what each man chose to preserve. Clark wrote a small essay; Gass wrote two sentences; Whitehouse recorded a fish fight nobody else mentions.
The Cherry Harvest and the Whiskey Barrel
Four of the five narrators record a communal gathering of wild cherries, and three specify what was done with them. Ordway is matter-of-fact:
we gathered a quantity of cherries at noon time & put in to the Whiskey barrel
Whitehouse confirms the same operation, locating it “at Butter run” on the west shore and noting the men “pull‘d a Great Quantity of wild Cherrys put them in the Barrel of whisky.” Gass identifies the fruit botanically —
a great quantity of cherries, called by some choak-cherries
— but omits the whiskey barrel entirely. Floyd, who names the tributary “Cherry Run” on his own authority, describes the bushes themselves:
thay Gro on Low Bushes about as High as a mans hed
No two narrators preserve the same combination of detail. Only by stacking the entries does the full scene emerge: chokecherries, picked from head-high bushes along a small unnamed run, dumped into the spirits ration to flavor it.
Clark, conspicuously, does not mention the cherries at all. His attention was elsewhere.
Clark Ashore: The First Boundless Prairie
Clark’s entry is the longest by a wide margin and reads as a small set-piece. He left the boat after a breakfast of “rosted Ribs of a Deer” intending to track elk, then abandoned the pursuit when the landscape stopped him:
Came Suddenly into an open and bound less Prarie, I Say bound less because I could not See the extent of the plain in any Derection… This prospect was So Sudden & entertaining that I forgot the object of my prosute and turned my attention to the Variety which presented themselves to my view
This is among the earliest of Clark’s prairie-as-revelation passages, and it is striking that none of the other journalists register the moment as anything unusual. Floyd notes flatly that “the Land on the N. is Low, Land that on the South is High prarie Land.” Ordway sees “praries on the top” of the yellow clifts. The grass-height detail Clark records — “about 18 Inches or 2 feat high” — appears verbatim in his second, more formal entry for the day (“grass about 18 Inchs. high”), suggesting he carried the measurement back to the boat as a fact worth preserving twice.
Clark also turned naturalist on the walk, tracing a stream three miles to its mouth between two clifts and identifying “Sand Stone Containing Iron ore” embedded under clay just above the waterline. None of the other four narrators mention iron ore. This is single-source geology.
What Each Narrator Alone Preserved
The day is a useful case study in the non-redundancy of the journals. Whitehouse alone records the curious incident of
two large Cat fish had hold of Each other could not get off one of the french men Shot the two the first Shot
— a vivid vignette absent from every other entry. Floyd alone names “Cherry Run.” Ordway alone names “Bakers oven & an Island called Bakers Island,” though Clark seconds the name in his expanded entry (“Bakers oven or in french Four le Tour tere”). Ordway also alone notes that Bratton found “Callimous (sweet flag we call it)” opposite the camp in large quantity. Clark alone explains the naming of Butter Island: “as at this place we mad use of the last of our butter.”
The Ordway-Whitehouse relationship, often visible as direct copying, is looser here. Both mention the cherries-in-whiskey and the willow-island camp, but Whitehouse’s catfish episode and Ordway’s calamus and Bratton-and-Drouillard hunting note do not overlap. On this date Whitehouse appears to be writing independently, or at least selectively.
Gass’s brevity is its own datum: where Clark wrote several hundred words on a single afternoon’s walk, Gass condensed the entire day into thirty-six. The carpenter recorded what he saw from the boat; the captain recorded what he found when he left it.
