The squall of July 14, 1804 produced one of the most strikingly redundant entries in the early expedition record. Five narrators preserve accounts of the same brief crisis — a northeast wind that struck the keelboat near the upper point of a sand island shortly after a 7 a.m. departure — and the variations among their tellings expose how each man processed the same forty minutes of danger.
The Same Storm, Five Vantage Points
Clark’s account is by far the longest and most technically precise. He fixes the boat’s position relative to a collapsing bank “lined with Snags as far as we could See down,” specifies that the wind struck “on the Starbd. quarter,” and credits the tarpaulin-covered lockers with shedding the waves that would otherwise have filled the hull. He alone names George Gibson as the steadier of the two pirogues, noting Gibson’s craft was “under the charge” with “her Ster faceing the wind” — a small command detail invisible to the other narrators.
Ordway’s version tracks Clark’s so closely in phrasing and sequence that the parallel is unmistakable. Both record the cloud as “black & dismal,” both describe the river becoming smooth in “one minute,” and Ordway even includes the editorial footnote pointing to Clark’s famous line:
the Storm Sudenly Seased. and the river became Instancetaniously as Smoth as Glass.
Whitehouse, by contrast, compresses the entire ordeal into two sentences and gets the wind direction wrong — he calls it a “Smart wind” without cardinal bearing, where Clark, Ordway, and Floyd all specify the northeast (Floyd writes “South,” the only narrator to misplace it). Whitehouse’s brevity here is notable given his usual practice of expanding Ordway’s text; on this date the copying pattern reverses or breaks down entirely.
What Floyd and Gass Preserve
Floyd’s entry is the most physically immediate. He alone records that the boat “Shipt about i Barrels of water” — a quantitative detail neither Clark nor Ordway provides, despite their longer accounts. Floyd also gives the cleanest causal chain: storm, jump out, hold her, wind fair, sail. His prose is short because he was writing what his body remembered, not what the captains dictated.
Gass offers the outsider’s summary. Writing later from a polished manuscript tradition, he renders the crisis in a single clause — “all hands had to leap into the water to save the boat” — and moves on to elk sightings and the Nishnabotna River crossing. Gass is the only narrator besides Ordway to name the river (he gives it as “Wash-ba-to-nan”; Ordway as “Neash-na-Batto-na”; Floyd as “Neeshba”), and the orthographic spread across three journals on a single tributary illustrates how unstable Indigenous and French-derived place-names remained in the party’s ears.
The Lost Notes
One detail surfaces only in Ordway and deserves attention:
Cap* Clarks notes & Remarks of 2 days blew overboard this morning in the Storm, and he was much put to it to Recolect the courses &.C.
Clark himself does not mention this loss. The omission is telling — his July 14 entry is unusually elaborate, with two separate drafts preserved in the record, and the second draft reads almost like a reconstruction exercise. Ordway’s offhand note suggests that the lavish detail in Clark’s storm narrative may itself be a recovery, written to replace the courses and bearings the wind had carried away.
The cross-narrator record also confirms that Reuben Fields, in charge of the horses overland, had failed to rejoin the party the previous night and arrived only that evening — a logistical thread Clark and Ordway both track but Gass, Floyd, and Whitehouse omit. Clark closes with the day’s botanical inventory (wild timothy, lamb’s-quarter, plums, gooseberries) and the elk he shot on the lower bank, reasserting after the storm the captain’s habit of cataloguing the country he had nearly lost his boat to.
