The entries from August 16, 1804, written from a camp roughly three miles northeast of the abandoned Omaha village, offer an unusually clean opportunity to compare how three members of the Corps of Discovery rendered the same shared experience. Captain Meriwether Lewis led a party of twelve men to a nearby creek and pond with a bush drag net; the resulting catch became one of the most heavily documented fishing episodes of the early expedition. Yet each surviving narrator — William Clark, Charles Floyd, and Joseph Whitehouse — chose strikingly different details to preserve.
The Same Catch, Three Tallies
Clark’s two parallel entries (his field notes and his journal proper) supply the most elaborate accounting. He breaks the haul down by species with the care of a quartermaster’s ledger:
Capt Lewis with men went out to the Creek & Pond & Caught about 800 fine fish with a Bush Drag of the following kind i.e. 79 Pike, 8 Salmon, 1 Rock, 1 flat Back, 127 Buffalow & readHorse, 4 Bass & 490 Cat, with many Small & large Silver fish
Floyd, writing as a sergeant and not as a co-commander, compresses the same event to a single line:
Capt Lewis and 12 of his men went to the Creek a fishen Caut 709 fish Differnt Coindes
The discrepancy in totals is telling. Floyd reports 709 fish; Clark estimates “about 800” and his itemized species list sums to 709 named fish plus an unspecified quantity of “Small & large Silver fish.” Floyd appears to have recorded only the counted, sorted total, while Clark rounded upward to include the uncounted silver fish. The two figures are not in conflict so much as in different categories of accounting — Floyd the bare arithmetic, Clark the gestural estimate framed by taxonomy.
Whitehouse, by contrast, omits the fishing expedition entirely. His entry treats August 16 as a routine day in camp:
the weather was fine the men Ocepyed their time in Cam[p] Repairing their Arms, and Cloathing.
This silence is itself revealing. Whitehouse, a private, was evidently among the men left in camp rather than among the twelve who accompanied Lewis. His journal preserves the perspective of those who stayed behind — mending equipment, tending to clothing — a perspective entirely absent from the captains’ and Floyd’s accounts.
LaBiche and the Missing Detachment
Whitehouse alone records the return of LaBiche (rendered “LaeBash”):
LaeBash returned by himSelf Lost the Party and came to Camp with measige.^
This is the only mention across the three narrators of LaBiche’s solo return from the detachment that had been sent to treat with the Otoes. Clark gestures at the same problem in the negative — “The Party Sent to the Ottoes not yet arrived” — but does not note that a messenger had broken off and come in alone. Floyd is silent on the matter. The pattern repeats a phenomenon visible elsewhere in the journals: enlisted narrators frequently preserve the small human movements of camp life — who arrived, who was lost, who carried what message — that the captains, focused on consolidated reports, pass over.
Register and Repetition
A comparison of Clark’s two versions of the day demonstrates his working method. The field notes and the journal entry are nearly identical in structure and phrasing, with only minor variations: “Caught about 800 fine fish” becomes “Cought upwards of [800] fine fish”; “the night’s are Cool & a Breeze rises” becomes “everry evening a Breeze rises.” The species list, however, is reproduced verbatim, suggesting Clark transcribed it directly from a tally kept at the creek.
Floyd’s entry shows no evidence of borrowing from Clark — his total of 709 differs, and his diction (“a fishen,” “Differnt Coindes”) is his own. This independence is consistent with Floyd’s pattern through the early summer: he writes briefly, in his own hand, without apparent access to or interest in the captains’ more elaborate notes. Whitehouse, similarly, draws on no other narrator here; his “measige” about LaBiche is unique to his account.
Together, the three entries from August 16 illustrate a recurring truth about the expedition’s documentary record: the most complete picture of any given day requires reading the captains’ precision against the sergeants’ compression and the privates’ attention to the unrecorded edges of camp life.
