A Day Measured in Buffalo
The 9th of September 1804 produced one of the expedition’s first genuine encounters with the bison herds of the upper Missouri, and the cross-narrator record converges almost entirely on that fact. Clark, walking the Larboard shore, supplies the day’s signature image:
I saw at one view near the river at least 500 Buffalow, those animals have been in view all day feeding in the Plains on the L. S. every Copse of timber appear to have Elk or Deer.
Ordway echoes the abundance secondhand, reporting that
Cap.t Clark Informed us that the plains were allmost covered with Buffalow the most of this days walk.
Gass keeps it terser — “several gangs or herds of buffaloe on the sides of the hills” — and Whitehouse, characteristically, compresses still further: “Saw Several Gangs of Buffalow on the Side hills on S. S.” The shared phrasing “gangs” and “Side hills on S. S.” between Ordway and Whitehouse is consistent with the well-documented pattern of Whitehouse abbreviating from Ordway’s fuller text.
The Hunt Tally
The kill count is where the narrators diverge in interesting ways. Clark’s own ledger reads cleanly: Drouillard three deer, Clark one buffalo, York two, Reubin Field one. Ordway scales it down to Drouillard’s “1 Buck & 2 fauns” and a single Reubin Field buffalo, plus Clark’s at dusk — omitting York entirely. Gass, by contrast, is the only enlisted journalist who credits York directly:
one of our hunters killed one, and captain Clarke’s black servant killed two.
That Gass preserves York’s two buffalo while Ordway and Whitehouse drop him is a small but telling artifact of how the enslaved man’s contributions filtered unevenly through the journals. Clark’s own entry confirms the assignment — “I Derected my Servent York with me to kill a Buffalow” — and the “Y. 2” in his tally matches Gass’s count exactly.
Lewis Alone at the Bluff
Against this chorus of buffalo-counting, Lewis’s entry for the date is a single sentence about something none of the others mention:
Capt. Clark found on the Lard shore under a high bluff issuing from a blue earth a bittuminus matter resembling molasses in consistance, colour and taste-
The observation is striking on several counts. First, Clark himself does not record the seep in his own journal — Lewis is preserving Clark’s field discovery, presumably from camp conversation. Second, Lewis’s willingness to note that Clark tasted the bituminous matter is the kind of casual hazard the captains absorbed without comment. Third, the geological detail — bitumen issuing from blue earth — is exactly the sort of mineralogical note Lewis was charged by Jefferson to collect, and it survives only because Lewis bothered to write it down on a day when his co-captain was preoccupied with hunting.
The split is characteristic. Clark, on shore among the herds, produces the panoramic count and the hunt log. Lewis, evidently aboard the boat for most of the day (Ordway notes only that “Capt Clark went on Shore”), records the one piece of natural-history data that would otherwise have been lost. The enlisted men — Gass, Ordway, Whitehouse — reproduce the buffalo and the kills in descending order of detail but ignore the bitumen entirely.
What the Composite Adds
Read alone, any single entry undersells the day. Whitehouse’s three sentences would suggest a routine march. Lewis’s one sentence would suggest a geology day with no hunting. Only the composite shows what actually happened: a long shore-walk by Clark across plains “allmost covered” with buffalo, a coordinated hunt that included York as a shooter, Drouillard ranging for deer, Reubin Field bringing in his own buffalo, and — somewhere along a Larboard bluff of blue earth — Clark pausing to taste a black ooze that Lewis would be the only one to write down.
