The entries for August 9, 1804 offer a rare alignment: four narrators — William Clark, Patrick Gass, Charles Floyd, and Joseph Whitehouse — all describing the same morning fog, the same delayed departure, and the same evening encampment on the south bank of the Missouri near the Soldier River. Read together, these accounts illuminate how the expedition’s journalists divided narrative labor, sometimes overlapping, sometimes diverging in their attention.
A Shared Morning, Four Clocks
All four writers fix the day’s beginning to the lifting of fog, but their precision varies. Clark, in both of his parallel entries, gives the most exact account, noting the party was detained “untill 1/2 passed 7 oClock.” Floyd echoes the captain almost verbatim:
Set out at 7 oclock a, m, after the fague was Gon which is verry thick in this Cuntrey
Gass agrees on the hour — “we could not proceed before 7” — while Whitehouse offers a looser estimate, writing that the morning “Cleard Up at 8 Oclock.” The hour-long discrepancy between Whitehouse and the others is characteristic: Whitehouse, an enlisted private, frequently rounds times and distances where Clark and Floyd record them precisely. His entry is also the briefest, focused almost entirely on sailing conditions: “the Wind blew south had Good Sailing for better than 14 Miles.”
The mileage estimates themselves diverge in revealing ways. Gass logs eleven miles plus a fifteen-mile shortcut where the river cut through a neck of land. Floyd records seventeen miles. Whitehouse claims twenty, by “Roaed & Sail.” Such variation is typical of the expedition’s pre-instrument reckoning, where each journalist relied on his own count of the day’s progress.
Clark and Floyd: The Captain and His Shadow
Floyd’s entry deserves particular attention because it places him alongside Clark on the south bank: “Cap! Clark and my Self went out on the South side.” Gass independently confirms this excursion, writing that “Captain Clarke and one of the men went out to hunt and killed a small turkey.” Gass, observing from the boat, does not know that the man was Floyd; Floyd, walking with the captain, does not mention the turkey at all. Instead, Floyd attends to a hazard the others miss — “a verry Bad place in the River whare the water is verry Shellow.” Clark, in his second variant entry, mentions crossing “an Istmust of 3/4 of a mile,” suggesting the same overland detour Gass describes as a fifteen-mile river-cutoff.
Clark’s two parallel entries, themselves slightly divergent, demonstrate his habit of revising field notes into a fair-copy journal. The first version emphasizes the turkey kill and “great deel of Beaver Sign,” noting “one Beaver Cought.” The second drops the turkey, substitutes an elk sighting, and adds the isthmus crossing. Together they read as a writer thinking on paper, weighing which observations merited preservation.
The Mosquitoes’ Verdict
Three of the four narrators close the day with the same complaint, and their phrasing reveals register. Gass, the carpenter and sergeant whose journal was later edited for publication, produces the most polished sentence:
We encamped on the south side, where we found the musquetoes very troublesome.
Clark’s field-style version is more emphatic and personal: “Musquetors worse this evening than ever I have Seen them.” His second entry softens this to the conventional “Musqutors verry troubleson” — closer to Gass’s wording, possibly indicating a shared source-phrase or simply the limited vocabulary the men reached for when describing a daily torment. Floyd, alone among the four, omits the mosquitoes entirely, ending instead with the bare notation “Camp* on the South Side at prarie.” Whitehouse likewise says nothing of insects, his attention fixed on the sail and the day’s mileage.
The pattern across these four entries is consistent with broader observations about the expedition’s journal-keeping: Clark serves as the richest single source, Floyd often parallels Clark closely (a function of their physical proximity that day), Gass writes in the most finished prose, and Whitehouse offers a terse soldier’s-eye view weighted toward navigation and weather. On a quiet day with no encounter and no crisis, the differences between these four hands reveal as much about the writers as about the river.
