The entries for April 16, 1805, offer an unusually clear view of how the expedition’s four working journalists handled a shared day on the Missouri. Captain Clark walked ashore and killed an antelope; a party member trapped a notably large beaver; the boats passed three small creeks on the starboard side; the bluffs continued to display the coal seams and burnt-earth strata that had fascinated Lewis for days. Each narrator records some version of these events, but the divergences in detail, vocabulary, and emphasis are revealing.
Parallel Texts: Lewis and Clark
The closest textual relationship lies between the two captains. Clark’s brief entry and Lewis’s longer one share phrasing so precisely that one was almost certainly drafted with knowledge of the other. Both note the antelope, the “verry large Beaver Cought this morning,” the “three Small Creeks on the S. S.,” and the persistent “mineral appearances.” Clark writes:
a number of old hornets nests Seen in every bottom more perticularly in the one opposit to the place we camped this night
Lewis records the same observation but attributes it to Clark’s shore walk:
he informed me that he had seen many Buffaloe Elk and deer in his absence, and that he had met with a great number of old hornets nests in the woody bottoms through which he had passed.
The detail confirms what scholars have long suspected about this stretch of the journals: Lewis incorporated Clark’s verbal reports into his own entries, while Clark in turn drew on Lewis’s geological vocabulary. Clark’s phrase “mineral appearances of Coal & Salt together with Some appearance of Burnt hils” compresses what Lewis develops at length — a hypothesis that the burnt strata along the bluffs result from underground coal seams igniting:
l believe it to be the stratas of Coal seen in those hills which causes the fire and birnt appearances frequently met with in this quarter.
Lewis alone pursues the geological reasoning, observing that where the burnt earth shows in the face of the bluffs, the coal lies “presisely at the same hight” and is accompanied by “a sulphurious substance.” He also alone speculates about petrified wood, suggesting the river itself carbonates and then petrifies vegetable matter “when exposed to it’s influence for a length of time.” These passages confirm Lewis’s role as the expedition’s principal naturalist; Clark notes the phenomena, but Lewis theorizes them.
The Sergeants: Ordway’s Detail, Gass’s Compression
Sergeant John Ordway’s journal preserves details neither captain mentions. He alone notes the ice still piled on the north shore from the river’s spring breakup:
passed a Sand beach on the N. S. covered with Ice and Snow heaps it lay 4 feet thick where the it [ice] was drove in. When the river broke up.
Ordway also names the trapper of the celebrated beaver — “one of the party by the name of John Colter” — a specificity Lewis suppresses with the vague “one of the party,” and Clark omits entirely. Ordway’s eye for the seasonal turn is similarly distinct: “The trees are puting out Green, the Grass begin to Grow in the bottoms & plains which look beautiful.” Neither Lewis nor Clark, despite Lewis’s botanical interests, pauses on the greening landscape this day.
Ordway also offers a navigational note the captains skip: the difference between course distance and water distance. “came 17 miles as the courses was taken but by water the way we came it was about 26.” This is the sergeant’s working concern — the practical reckoning of a day’s travel along a winding river.
Patrick Gass, by contrast, compresses. His entry for April 16 is the briefest of the four, and his published text (edited by David McKeehan in 1807) bundles the 16th and 17th together with conventional phrasing: “a fair gentle wind,” “the day was fine and we made good way.” Gass mentions the antelope and the Grand Point camp but omits the beaver, the coal strata, the hornets’ nests, and the ice heaps. Where Ordway preserves field-diary texture, Gass — or his editor — produces a smoother, more generic travel narrative.
Register and Reliability
Read together, the four entries demonstrate the layered character of the expedition’s record. Lewis supplies natural-history theory; Clark supplies terse confirmation and survey detail; Ordway supplies the sergeant’s-eye particulars — names, distances, ice, weather, the look of new grass; Gass supplies the public-facing summary. A researcher relying on Gass alone would not know that John Colter caught the beaver, that ice still lay four feet thick on the north bank, or that Lewis had begun forming a theory of petrifaction along the Missouri. The cross-narrator comparison for this single day is a reminder that the expedition’s “journal” is in fact a chorus, and that the quieter voices preserve what the louder ones pass over.
