The encampment at the head of Nadawa Island produced an unusually rich documentary day. All six expedition diarists left entries, and the comparison reveals a sharp division of labor: Lewis devotes his page entirely to administrative reform, Clark balances logistics with geography, and the enlisted journalists handle the landscape and incident.
Lewis’s Detachment Order: An Administrative Pivot
Lewis’s entry is wholly given over to a Detachment Order assigning permanent cooks to each sergeant’s mess — John B. Thompson to Floyd’s, William Warner to Ordway’s, and John Collins to Pryor’s. The order is meticulously bureaucratic, specifying that the appointed superintendents are
held immediately respon sible to the commanding Officers for a judicious consumption of the provi sion which they recieve; they are to cook the same for their several messes in due time, and in such manner as is most wholesome and best calculated to afford the greatest proportion of nutriment
In exchange the cooks are exempted from guard duty, tent-pitching, and firewood collection. The timing is telling. Clark notes that
five men Sick to day with a violent Head ake &c. and Several with Boils
The mess reorganization, then, is not abstract housekeeping. With multiple men down — Clark names Drewyer, R. Fields, and Guterich among those affected or detached — Lewis is formalizing food handling at the precise moment that disease and boils are sweeping the boat. Only by reading Lewis’s order against Clark’s sick-list does the public-health logic of the reform become visible.
The Geography of Nadawa Island
Clark, characteristically, supplies the measured topography. He records two passes through a narrow channel of “45 to 80 yds wide five miles to the mouth” of the Nadawa, estimates the river at seventy yards across, and judges the island
the largest I have Seen in the river, containing 7 or 8000 acres of Land Seldom overflowed
Whitehouse independently agrees on scale (“the head of of a large Island”) and uniquely preserves a latitude reading — “latude 39, 39, 22” — that none of the other narrators bothers to record. He also offers a folk etymology absent elsewhere: that Nadawa means “little woody River” in “Indian tounge.” The editorial footnote in Ordway’s text disputes this, noting that the word reportedly means “some kind of snake.” Whitehouse’s two spellings on a single page (“Nan doughe” and “Nandouie”) illustrate how unstable Indigenous place-names remained in the enlisted journals; Ordway alone produces the modern spelling “Nodaway.”
Gass is terse, noting only that “The river here is crooked and narrow” and that the creek “flows in from the north.” Floyd, writing one of his last weeks of entries, adds weather absent from the others — “Rain Last night with wind from the E” — and pronounces the land “Good and well timberd.”
Divergences and the Hunters
Two small discrepancies are worth noting. Whitehouse reports that
a bear apeared but Coult not be Shot Made his Alopement
No other narrator mentions a bear. Whether this was a genuine sighting passed over by the officers or a Whitehouse embellishment cannot be determined from the record. More substantively, Ordway and Clark disagree on the day’s kill: Ordway reports “the Hunters killed one Deer to day but did not Join us at night,” while Clark notes that “The french men Killed a young Deer on the Bank.” These may be two separate events — Clark’s deer taken from the boat party, Ordway’s by the absent flank hunters — and Clark’s closing line that “our flank party did not join us this evening” supports that reading.
The day also exposes Ordway’s documented habit of leaning on Clark. The editorial apparatus accompanying his entry observes that “Ordway here seems to have fallen into error through attempting to copy Clark,” a reminder that the apparent independence of the enlisted journals is sometimes illusory. Yet on this particular Sunday Ordway holds his own — correctly spelling Nodaway, supplying the only mention of timbered uplands on the north bank, and documenting the hunters’ failure to rejoin camp.
Read together, the six entries reconstruct a day that no single narrator preserved: an administrative reorganization driven by sickness, executed at a measured camp on the largest island yet seen, beside a river whose name nobody could quite agree how to spell.
