The expedition’s encampment near the Maha village on August 15, 1804 produced an unusually rich opportunity for cross-narrator comparison: four journalists — Clark, Gass, Floyd, and Whitehouse — all recorded the day’s events, and all four converge on the same two episodes. A party went fishing at a beaver-dammed creek, and a column of smoke on the opposite bank prompted a small reconnaissance. Yet the four accounts diverge sharply in length, precision, and what each writer considered worth preserving.
The Fish Count Discrepancy
The most immediate puzzle in the day’s record is numerical. Clark, who led the fishing party himself, gives two slightly different totals in his field notes and journal: 308 fish in one version, 318 in the other, taken with an improvised willow-and-bark drag. He itemizes the catch with a naturalist’s care:
Pike, Samon, Bass, Pirch, Red horse, Small Cat, & a kind of Perch Called on the Ohio Silverfish
Gass, writing retrospectively across several days, reports a different figure entirely — 387 fish — and attributes a separate, larger haul of 709 fish (including 167 pike) to a second outing led by Captain Lewis. Floyd, in his terse entry, also records the 709 figure but credits it to “Capt Lewis and 12 of his men.” Whitehouse echoes Floyd almost exactly, noting “Cap!”. Lewis went out the Nixt day with his party and Returned with 709 fish Neerly 200 pike fish amongst them.”
The pattern suggests that Floyd and Whitehouse are reporting a Lewis-led expedition that occurred after Clark’s August 15 outing — Gass, writing in summary mode, telescopes both events into one passage. Clark’s entry, dated strictly to the 15th, captures only his own party’s work. The 709-fish haul appears to belong to a subsequent day that Gass folded backward into his August 15 narrative.
Register and Detail: Clark Alone Notices
Beyond the numbers, the four entries differ dramatically in scope. Clark is the only writer to mention the shrimp — a detail he connects to his own memory of the lower Mississippi:
I cought a Srimp prosisely of Shape Size & flavour of those about N. Orleans & the lower party of the Mississippi
He is also alone in recording the “emince beads of Mustles Verry large & fat” in the creek, the ducks and plover on the ponds, and the ecological character of the “pass or Streight from Beaver Pond to another.” Gass, Floyd, and Whitehouse name no species at all beyond pike. This is consistent with a broader pattern in the expedition records: Clark functions as the principal field naturalist of the captains’ journals, while the enlisted-man journalists tend toward event-summary rather than taxonomy.
The Smoke on the Opposite Bank
All four narrators register the smoke episode, but with revealing differences. Clark provides the operational detail — Captain Lewis dispatched “Mr. Durioue the Souix interpeter & three men” (the Sioux interpreter Pierre Dorion) specifically to find a band of Sioux the interpreter believed to be nearby. Gass, by contrast, reports only that “four men crossed to see if any of the Mahas or Sioux Indians were there.” The discrepancy in numbers (three men plus Dorion versus four men) is minor, but Gass omits Dorion entirely — flattening a deliberate diplomatic mission into a generic scouting trip.
Both Clark and Gass arrive at the same conclusion: the fire had been left by a small Sioux party several days earlier, and a hard wind had spread it. Floyd and Whitehouse omit the smoke incident altogether, focusing exclusively on the fish.
Convergence and Telescoping
Gass’s entry, because it covers the period from August 15 through the 20th in a single passage, contains information the other three narrators could not yet have recorded on the 15th itself — the return of the party pursuing the deserter Reed, the council with the Otoes on the 19th, and Sergeant Floyd’s sudden illness with “a complaint somewhat like a violent cholick.” Floyd’s own entry for August 15 gives no hint of the sickness that would kill him five days later. The juxtaposition is sobering: on a day Floyd recorded merely the fish count, Gass’s retrospective hand has already begun to frame the sergeant’s final illness.
