April 9, 1805 finds the Corps of Discovery only one day removed from Fort Mandan, working their pirogues and canoes upriver under a southeast breeze. Four men keep journals this day — Patrick Gass, John Ordway, Meriwether Lewis, and William Clark — and the resulting entries offer an unusually clean comparative case for studying how the expedition’s narrators divided observational labor.
Compression and Expansion
Gass’s entry is the shortest by an order of magnitude. He records only the encounter with Hidatsa hunters and the day’s mileage:
1 o’clock we passed a party of Grossventers hunting: made about twenty-two miles and encamped on the North side.
Ordway, writing from the same sergeant’s perspective, preserves the identical mileage figure (“22 miles to day”) and the same midday meeting, but expands the scaffolding around it. He notes the beaver caught overnight in a trap, the cottonwood bottoms, the shifting wind, and — crucially — that “our officers halted and Smoaked a Short time with them,” a diplomatic detail Gass omits entirely. Ordway also registers the season’s first annoyance:
the Musquetoes begin to Suck our blood this afternoon
Clark independently notes the same phenomenon in the singular — “I saw a Musquetor to day” — confirming that both men found the first mosquito of the season worth recording, while Lewis and Gass let it pass. The convergence suggests Ordway and Clark were comparing notes, or at least sharing the same threshold for what counted as a noteworthy first.
Captains Diverging
The most revealing comparison is between the two captains. Clark and Lewis cover overlapping ground but allocate their attention very differently. Both record the burrowing animal smaller than the prairie dog; both note the carbonated wood strata in the bluffs (“from 1 inch to 5 feet thick,” Clark writes, a phrasing Lewis echoes almost verbatim as “unequal thicknesses from 1 to 5 feet”). Both mark the brant flying upriver. The shared phrasing on the coal strata is close enough to suggest one captain consulted the other’s notes, a documented habit of theirs.
But where Clark stops at observation, Lewis elaborates. Clark gives the burrowing animal a single sentence; Lewis devotes a full paragraph to a separate, unseen burrower whose workings resemble “the salamander common to the sand hills of the States of South Carolina and Georgia,” complete with measurements of the soil disturbance — “about an inch and a half in diameter” — and a hypothesis about how the earth is ejected without a visible aperture. Lewis also pauses on the white brant, noting the black wing feathers and admitting taxonomic uncertainty:
I have not yet positively determined whether they are the same, or a different species.
Clark sees the same brant and writes only “great numbers of Brant flying up the river.” The register difference is consistent with the broader pattern across the journals: Clark functions as the expedition’s geographer and log-keeper, while Lewis takes on the natural-historical and ethnographic burden.
What Only Lewis Records
Two details appear in Lewis alone. The first is the departure of the Indian guide who had promised to accompany them to the Shoshone — Clark mentions the man’s decision in passing (“at Brackfast the Indian deturmined to return to his nation”), but Lewis frames it as a logistical setback. The second, and more vivid, is Sacagawea’s foraging:
the squaw busied herself in serching for the wild artichokes which the mice collect and deposit in large hoards. this operation she performed by penetrating the earth with a sharp stick about some small collections of drift wood.
Neither Clark, Ordway, nor Gass mentions her at all on April 9. This is a recurring asymmetry: Lewis attends to Sacagawea’s subsistence knowledge as ethnographic data worth preserving, while the other journalists treat her presence as unremarkable enough to omit. Readers reconstructing her contributions to the expedition depend disproportionately on Lewis’s willingness to record what the others walked past.
Taken together, the four April 9 entries demonstrate the documentary value of the expedition’s redundancy. Gass anchors the day in mileage, Ordway in routine and weather, Clark in geography and species lists, and Lewis in the digressive natural-historical detail that would later make the journals indispensable to American science.
