The meeting between the homeward-bound Corps of Discovery and a Missouri River trading boat on 6 September 1806 produced a rare alignment of three journal accounts. Patrick Gass, John Ordway, and William Clark each describe the same sequence of events: a herd of elk that escaped the hunters, a flock of pelicans, the chance encounter with a barge belonging to a St. Louis merchant, and the distribution of the first spirituous liquor the party had tasted in fourteen months. Yet the three entries differ sharply in detail, register, and political awareness — and the variations reveal as much about the narrators as they do about the day.
A Shared Anniversary, Three Registers
All three narrators fix the encounter against the same temporal marker: the long dry stretch since Independence Day 1805. Gass writes that the party
got some spirituous liquors from this party the first we had tasted since the 4th of July 1805, and remained with them about three hours.
Clark echoes the phrasing almost exactly, noting that the gallon of whiskey purchased from the trader supplied
a dram which is the first Spiritious licquor which had been tasted by any of them Since the 4 of July 1805.
The verbal closeness suggests either that Clark and Gass conferred at camp or that the anniversary was on every man’s lips that afternoon. Ordway, characteristically more focused on his own transactions, omits the July 1805 reference entirely and instead reports that the visiting boat "gave us a little whiskey" before pivoting to his personal trade: "I traded for a hat and Shirt by giveing them beaver Skins." Where Gass measures the event in collective memory, Ordway measures it in beaver pelts.
Naming the Trader, Naming the Stakes
The most striking divergence concerns the identity of the boat’s owner. Gass writes vaguely of "a Mr. Shotto, of St. Louis," and Ordway similarly records "Mr Shoetoe of St Louis," adding only that the vessel was "manned with 12 frenchman" under a French captain. Clark alone supplies the full commercial geography:
we met a tradeing boat of Mr. Ag. Choteaux of St Louis bound to the River Jacque to trade with the Yanktons, this boat was in Care of a Mr. Henry Delorn.
Clark identifies Auguste Chouteau by name, names the supercargo Henry Delorn (Delaurier), and specifies the destination — the River Jacques — and the intended trading partners, the Yanktons. The sergeants’ more generic accounts may reflect their distance from the captains’ conversations with Delorn, but they also reflect Clark’s habitual interest in the commercial and diplomatic structure of the upper Missouri trade.
That diplomatic interest surfaces again in a passage absent from both sergeants’ journals. Clark records that the captains warned Delorn against the Tetons:
We advised this trader to treat the Tetons with as much Contempt as possible and Stated to him where he would be benefited by such treatment.
Ordway preserves a softened echo — "our officers purswaded them not to trade with the Tetons nation" — while Gass omits the political instruction altogether. The sergeants record what they saw; Clark records what he intended.
What Only Clark Notices
Clark’s entry is also alone in registering two pieces of news from downriver: that "all the troops had movd. from the Illinois and that Genl. Wilkinson was prepareing to leave St. Louis." For a captain who had been out of contact with the United States since the spring of 1805, this was the first political intelligence in many months, and his careful notation of it stands in pointed contrast to the sergeants’ silence.
Equally distinctive is the closing line of Clark’s entry, a domestic detail no other journalist records:
The Chief & the Squaws & children are awarey of their journey. Children cry &c.
The Mandan chief Sheheke and his family, traveling east with the expedition, appear nowhere in Gass or Ordway’s entries for the day. Clark — who had spent the winter at Fort Mandan in close contact with these families — sees them. The cross-narrator comparison thus exposes a familiar pattern: Gass condenses, Ordway personalizes, and Clark observes both the political horizon and the human one within his own boat.
