The entries for August 23, 1804 mark a small but symbolically charged moment in the expedition’s progress up the Missouri: the killing of the party’s first buffalo, brought down by Joseph Field on the plains above the river near present-day southeastern South Dakota. Three narrators — William Clark, Patrick Gass, and Joseph Whitehouse — describe the same sequence of events, but the comparison reveals how differently each man organized a day’s experience on the page.
The Buffalo and the Hunting Party
All three accounts agree on the basic chain of events: an early start, Clark’s walk ashore and his killing of a buck, Field’s discovery of a buffalo on the plain, a detail of men sent out to retrieve the carcass, and the wounding of two elk that swam past the boat. The differences lie in how each narrator weights these incidents.
Clark’s field notes are the most procedural, threading the hunting incidents through a sequence of compass courses:
Course West 4 Mls. to the mouth of a Small run between two Bluffs of yellow Clay North 3 1/4 miles to the upper Pt. of Some timber in the bend to S. S. near where R. fields Killed the Buffalow
His later expanded entry drops the courses and reads more as narrative, noting that
Cap Lewis took 12 men and had the buffalow brought to the boat in the next bend to the S S.
Whitehouse — who often draws on Clark’s phrasing but adds his own observations — gives the fullest hunting roster, naming Collins’s fawn and specifying that
Cap! Lewis & 10 men of the party went out & Brought it to the Boat.
The discrepancy in the size of Lewis’s detail (ten men in Whitehouse, twelve in Clark’s expanded entry, eight in the field notes) is characteristic of the small numerical drift that appears when several journals describe the same logistical event.
Gass, writing for eventual publication, smooths the day into clean declarative prose and credits the buck to Clark himself rather than to Field’s separate hunt:
Captain Clarke and one of the men killed a deer and a buffaloe
He also adds a domestic detail the others omit — that the men
salted two barrels of buffaloe meat
while wind-bound — and records Clark’s naming of the site as "Buffaloe prairie," a toponymic gesture neither Clark nor Whitehouse preserves in their own entries for the day.
The Wind and the Sand
The most striking divergence is the day’s weather. Gass and Whitehouse note only that the wind rose and forced a halt; Whitehouse adds that the party used the delay productively:
the wind verry hard so we jurked our meat &c.
Clark, however, devotes some of his most vivid descriptive prose of the early voyage to the blowing sand:
The Wind blew hard West and raised the Sands off the bar in Such Clouds that we Could Scercely See this Sand being fine and verry light Stuck to every thing it touched, and in the Plain for a half a mile the distance I was out every Spire of Grass was covered with the Sand or Dust
The image — grass turned white by airborne sand — is the kind of observational detail Clark increasingly indulges as the expedition moves into the open country above the Platte. Neither Gass nor Whitehouse registers the phenomenon at all. The omission is instructive: Gass’s published narrative tends to compress weather into functional notes ("the wind changed and we were obliged to halt"), while Whitehouse, writing his rougher daily log, often records what affected the boat’s progress rather than what struck the eye.
Register and Reliance
Read together, the three entries suggest the working hierarchy of the journals at this stage of the voyage. Clark is the primary observer, generating both the navigational data and the descriptive set-pieces. Whitehouse appears to draw on Clark’s content — the same hunters, the same elk, the same prairie wolves — but reorders the material chronologically and supplies enlisted-men’s particulars (Collins’s fawn, the jerking of meat) that an officer’s log might pass over. Gass, working toward a coherent published account, abstracts the day into a tidy paragraph and is willing to consolidate or reassign incidents (the buck credited to Clark, the prairie named) for narrative economy.
What no narrator quite emphasizes is the symbolic weight of the day’s kill. The first buffalo brought to the boat would, within weeks, become the expedition’s staple meat; on August 23 it is logged simply as one carcass among several, retrieved by a working party and absorbed into the day’s commissary alongside two deer, a fawn, and an elk shot by Shields from the boat at evening.
