The day’s labor was miserable and familiar: shallow water, sandbars, men out of the boat dragging her over. Gass, Ordway, and Whitehouse all log the same drudgery in nearly identical phrasing. What elevates September 14, 1804 above a routine entry is what Clark brought back from a fruitless side errand — he had walked ashore looking for an old volcano reported by James Mackay of St. Charles, found nothing of the kind, and killed instead the expedition’s first pronghorn antelope. Shields, traveling overland with the horse, killed a white-tailed jackrabbit. Both were creatures unknown to science east of the Missouri, and the cross-narrator record captures the moment of zoological discovery from five different vantages.
Five Descriptions of Two Animals
Lewis devotes nearly the entire entry to anatomical measurement. He gives the pronghorn’s weight (65 lbs), nose-to-tail length, girth, and the placement of the horn relative to the eye socket. For the hare he produces an even more meticulous account — ear dimensions to the eighth of an inch, the structure of the ear’s folds (“the inner foalds or those which ly together when the years are thrown back… is of a clear white colour except one inch at the tip”), the leap distance measured three days later (“21 feet the ground was a little decending”). This is Lewis the naturalist working in his element, treating the carcasses as type specimens.
Clark, who actually shot the antelope, writes more loosely but captures behavior and comparative anatomy Lewis omits. He notes the animal is “actively made,” that its brains sit “on the back of its head,” and lands on the comparison that would prove durable:
more like the antelope or gazella of Africa than any other Specis of Goat
Clark records this twice, in both his field and fair-copy entries — a sign he was pleased with the formulation. He also preserves the day’s only geological observation, that the plains “washes down into the flats, with the Smallest rain & disolves & mixes with the water,” explaining the river’s sudden muddiness.
Ordway’s Awe, Whitehouse’s Brevity, Gass’s Economy
Ordway’s entry is the most revealing of civilian reaction. Where Lewis measures and Clark compares, Ordway simply marvels:
Such an anamil was never yet known in U. S. States, the Cap4 had the Skins of the hair & Goat Stuffed in order to Send back to the city of Washington, the bones and all.
Ordway alone records the disposition of the specimens — that Clark intended to ship hide and skeleton east. He also notes the hare was “as big as a Uropean hare, nearly all white & of a different discription of any one ever yet seen in the States,” registering novelty without attempting Lewis’s precision.
Whitehouse, whose entries through this stretch frequently track Ordway’s, here departs from the pattern. His version is markedly shorter than Ordway’s and lacks the stuffed-specimen detail and the size comparison to the European hare. He notes only that “the Goat was killed by Cap! Clark & the first that was Seen by the party on the Missourie” — a framing neither Ordway nor Clark uses explicitly, suggesting Whitehouse occasionally adds his own gloss rather than copying wholesale.
Gass is characteristically terse. He alone mentions the porcupine the returning hunters brought in, the three beaver Drouillard caught, and that mosquitoes “are as troublesome as they have been any time in summer” — a small but useful phenological note the others skip.
The Volcano That Wasn’t
Only Clark records the original purpose of his walk: searching for an “old Vulcanio” reported by Mackay. Lewis ignores the errand entirely; the sergeants seem unaware of it. The detail matters because it shows the expedition operating on intelligence gathered at St. Charles months earlier, testing secondhand claims against ground truth. Clark’s quiet “I was Some distance out Could not See any Signs of a Volcanoe” is, in its way, as much a scientific result as Lewis’s measurements — a negative observation cleanly recorded. The day’s ledger thus shows the expedition adding two species to the eastern record while subtracting one phantom geological feature from it.
