The entries of October 16, 1804 offer an unusually rich opportunity for cross-narrator comparison. Three of the four journalists present — Ordway, Gass, and Clark — converge on a single dramatic event: an Arikara antelope drive on the Missouri above the Cannonball. Lewis, however, breaks entirely from the day’s communal narrative to record a natural-history experiment on a captive bird. The contrast lays bare the division of observational labor within the corps and the distinct registers each writer brought to his journal.
Three Accounts of the Antelope Drive
Clark, writing as the expedition’s principal chronicler, supplies the fullest version. He notes the approach, the discovery of swimmers among the herd, and a precise tally:
I saw 58 Killed in this way and on the Shore, the hunter with Cap Lewis Shot 3 goats I came too and Camped above the Ricara Camp on the L. S. Several Indians visited us duereing the night Some with meat, Sang and were merry all night.
Clark alone records the celebratory aftermath — the visiting, the meat-sharing, the singing through the night — details that situate the hunt within an Arikara social occasion rather than treating it as mere spectacle. He also alone observes that it is boys in the water wielding sticks, while mounted men on the banks manage the herd.
Ordway’s account is closely parallel and clearly drawn from the same vantage, though his count differs slightly:
They Shot upwards of 40 of them & got them to Shore, they had Shot them all with their Bows & arrows, we Saw Some of the Goats floating down with the arrows Sticking up in them
Where Clark emphasizes sticks wielded by boys, Ordway emphasizes bows and arrows, and contributes the vivid image of arrow-fletched carcasses drifting downstream. He also notices the horsemen “to keep them or the flock in the River” — a detail consistent with Clark’s mounted herders, suggesting the two sergeants compared notes or watched together.
Gass, characteristically, compresses. His version reduces the entire event to four sentences:
They had a flock of goats, or ante-lopes, in the river, and killed upwards of forty of them. Captain Lewis, and one of our hunters went out and killed three of the same flock. We encamped on the south side. This day we saw more than an hundred goats.
Gass’s “upwards of forty” matches Ordway’s figure rather than Clark’s specific 58, hinting at a shared lower estimate circulating among the enlisted men before Clark refined his count. Gass alone gives the gross day-total of more than a hundred animals sighted, framing the hunt within a wider abundance the others leave implicit.
Clark’s Ethnographic and Geographic Layer
Beyond the hunt, Clark carries the day’s geography almost single-handedly. He names five streams — Chien Creek, So-harch (Girls) Creek, Char-part (Womans) Creek, Kee-tooth Sar-kar-nar (Place of Beaver), and War-re-con-ne (Elk Shed Their Horns) — and identifies an earthwork above camp as the abandoned Cheyenne village, recalling that nation’s displacement by the Sioux from “the heads of red River of L Winipic where they Cultivated the lands.” Ordway notices the same Cheyenne site (“an old Shian fort”) and one of the creeks but leaves blanks where names should appear, evidently waiting on Clark for the toponyms. Gass omits the Cheyenne ruin entirely. The pattern is familiar: Clark functions as the geographic and ethnographic authority on whom the sergeants’ fair copies depend.
Lewis Apart: The Torpid Goatsucker
Lewis’s entry for the date occupies a different world. He records nothing of the hunt, the Cheyenne site, the wind, or the camp. Instead:
This day took a small bird alive of the order of the ____ or goat suckers. it appeared to be passing into the dormant state… I run my penknife into it’s body under the wing and completely distroyed it’s lungs and heartyet it lived upwards of two hours this fanominon I could not account for unless it proceeded from the want of circulation of the blood.
The Arikara name to’-na and the careful weight in troy grains mark this as a deliberate scientific notation, likely composed later and back-dated. Lewis’s silence on the antelope drive — an event Clark, Ordway, and Gass all found arresting — is striking, and may indicate that his shore walk with the Arikara chief took him out of sight of the river bend where the kill occurred. The division of attention is characteristic: while the others document the human and economic spectacle, Lewis pursues a physiological puzzle in a single torpid nightjar.
Read together, the four entries demonstrate how the expedition’s record was assembled from overlapping but non-redundant lines of sight. No single narrator captures the whole day; only the composite does.
