The journals of September 21, 1804 offer a particularly clear window into the stratified record-keeping of the Lewis and Clark expedition. Four narrators — William Clark, Patrick Gass, John Ordway, and Joseph Whitehouse — describe the same stretch of Missouri River around the Grand Detour (or Big Bend), yet the entries diverge sharply in what they include, what they omit, and how closely the enlisted men’s accounts track one another.
The Sandbar Collapse: Clark Alone
The most dramatic event of the day appears only in Clark’s journal. In the early morning hours, the sandbar on which the party had camped began to wash away beneath them. Clark gives the episode in two overlapping drafts, the second more circumstantial than the first:
at half past one oClock this morning the Sand bar on which we Camped began to under mind and give way which allarmed the Sergeant on Guard, the motion of the boat awakened me; I get up & by the light of the moon observed that the land had given away both above and below our Camp & was falling in fast. I ordered all hands on as quick as possible & pushed off, we had pushed off but a few minets before the bank under which the Boat & perogus lay give way, which would Certainly have Sunk both Perogues
Neither Gass, Ordway, nor Whitehouse mentions the near-disaster at all. Their entries open with the morning’s departure as if nothing unusual had occurred. The omission is striking: the loss of the pirogues would have crippled the expedition, yet only the captain on watch records it. This pattern — Clark documenting command-level crises invisible to the rank-and-file journals — recurs throughout the early voyage and reminds readers that the enlisted journals are not simply abbreviated versions of the captains’ record but a parallel stream with its own concerns.
Gass and Whitehouse: Shared Phrasing, Shared Source
Set side by side, the entries of Gass and Whitehouse show the textual kinship long noted by editors of the expedition journals. Gass writes of “black bluffs on the south, and a handsome bottom on the north side; and beyond these a cedar bottom on the south side and bluffs on the north; passed a creek on the south side, called Tyler’s creek; and encamped on the north side.” Whitehouse’s version is nearly identical in sequence and substance:
passed black bluffs on S. S. and handsom plains on N. S. pass? a ceeder bottom on S. S. and bluffs on the N. Side passed a creek on the S. S. called Tylors creek. Camped on the N. Side.
The shared catalog of bluff-bottom-bottom-bluff-creek, in the same order and with overlapping diction, suggests one narrator drew from the other or from a common note. Whitehouse adds the detail that the gorge of the bend is “not more than 2 miles across,” a measurement that aligns roughly with Clark’s reported “2000 yds.” stepped off by a sent man.
Ordway’s Naturalist’s Eye
Ordway’s entry stands apart from the other enlisted journals in its attentiveness to wildlife and to the small human texture of the day. He alone records the cached deer left by the hunters at the mouth of Tyler’s River, and he alone notes the moment Lewis pauses to shoot dinner:
here we Saw the Sand bars covered with w. head plovvers. Capt Lewis Shot some of them for his dinner
This kind of detail — a captain’s casual hunt for white-headed plovers — is precisely what is filtered out of Gass’s and Whitehouse’s compressed itineraries. Ordway also pairs with Clark in registering the southward migration of plover and brant, though Clark frames it more grandly as “an emence number of Plover of Different kind Collecting and takeing their flight Southerly.”
Measuring the Bend
All four narrators agree on the central geographic fact of the day: the Grand Detour measures roughly thirty miles around and little more than a mile across. Ordway gives “30 miles round and only [1¼] m. across in the nearest place”; Clark, more precisely, has the distance “arround” as 30 miles and the gorge stepped at 2,000 yards. Gass and Whitehouse both reference the camp of the 19th as the point of return. The agreement on these figures, against the variety of detail in the surrounding prose, suggests that mileage and bearings were the shared currency of the journals — the data every narrator was expected to carry, however differently each clothed it in narrative.
