By mid-August 1806, the Corps of Discovery had reunited and was descending the Missouri at remarkable speed, propelled by current, oars, and a favorable northwest wind. The journal entries for 13 August 1806 by William Clark, Patrick Gass, and John Ordway describe a single day’s travel past the mouth of the Little Missouri and toward an abandoned Hidatsa (Gros Ventre) wintering village. Read together, the three accounts reveal the layered editorial economy of the expedition’s record-keeping: a captain’s full log, a sergeant’s narrative summary, and a private soldier’s near-telegraphic note.
Three Registers, One River
Clark’s entry is the most complete. He opens with weather (“the last night was very Cold with a Stiff breeze from the N. W.”), fixes departure at sunrise, names two river mouths with timed passages, and totals the day’s run:
haveing came by the assistance of the wind, the Current and our oars 86 miles.
He then narrates a personal detour overland with Drouillard through a point of land, an unsuccessful elk hunt, and his rejoining the pirogues. He logs a sighting of Indians in a skin canoe — whom he tentatively identifies as Minetaras (Hidatsas) returning from a hunt — and notes two more Indians on a high hill. Clark closes with a small comfort: “the Misquetors are not So troublesom this evening as they have been. the air is cool.”
Gass condenses the same twenty-four hours into a single tidy paragraph. He preserves the early start (“we set out early in a fine morning”), times the passage of the Little Missouri (“about nine o’clock” — close to but not identical with Clark’s “8 A.M.”), and reports the encounter with fleeing Indians. Where Clark speculates about tribal identity, Gass omits ethnographic guesswork entirely. He does, however, supply a detail Clark elides: the encampment lies “opposite an old wintering village of the Grossventres, which had been deserted some time ago.” Clark names the camp at the mouth of “Myry river” but does not gloss the abandoned settlement on the opposite bank.
Ordway’s entry is the barest of the three — two clauses and a mileage shorthand:
and procd on verry well a fair breeze from the N.W. came a long distance this day and Camped on the N. Side.
He confirms the wind’s direction and the north-side camp but offers neither river names, times, nor the Indian sightings that occupy both Clark and Gass.
What Each Narrator Sees — and Misses
The cross-narrator pattern on this date follows a familiar expedition hierarchy. Clark, as commanding officer keeping the master log, supplies geography, chronology, distance, and tentative ethnography. Gass, whose published 1807 narrative was shaped for a reading audience, foregrounds human incident — fleeing Indians, the deserted village — and trims navigational minutiae. Ordway, writing for himself, retains only what a soldier on the water needed to remember: the wind held, the miles were good, the camp was on the north bank.
The discrepancies are instructive. Gass reports that the Indians “fled before they could speak to them,” suggesting the canoes ahead made an active attempt at contact. Clark, writing from his own position with the rear party, describes the same encounter more passively: “Some indians were Seen in a Skin Canoe below.” Neither account contradicts the other, but Gass — drawing on the report of those in the forward canoes — captures the attempted parley that Clark, farther back, did not witness. This is one of several days on the return journey where Gass’s published version preserves details that the captains’ logs leave implicit.
The timing of the Little Missouri’s passage shows a similar small divergence: Clark’s “8 A.M.” against Gass’s “about nine o’clock.” Such an hour’s drift between narrators is typical and likely reflects the imprecision of memory rather than disagreement; Gass’s qualifier “about” signals a rough estimate, while Clark’s notation suggests a glance at a watch.
An Eighty-Six-Mile Day
What unites all three entries is the sheer pace. Clark’s 86 miles — propelled by wind, current, and oars — is among the longest single-day runs the expedition recorded on the Missouri. Ordway’s “long distance” and Gass’s “went on very well during the whole of the day” register the same fact in plainer language. The Corps was hurrying toward the Mandan villages and, beyond them, St. Louis. The brevity of Ordway’s entry and the streamlined character of Gass’s may themselves be artifacts of that haste: men weary from a wind-driven dash had little energy for ink at nightfall, even as Clark, by duty and habit, filled his page.
