The entries for October 5, 1804 offer an unusually clean test case in cross-narrator comparison. All four journalists — Clark, Ordway, Gass, and Whitehouse — describe the same sequence of events on the Missouri below the Cheyenne River: a frosty dawn, a band of Teton men hailing from shore, a herd of pronghorn swimming the channel, and a prairie wolf shot in the water. Yet the toponyms each writer assigns to the creeks passed that day diverge sharply, exposing how quickly informal naming conventions could splinter among men traveling in the same boats.
One Herd, Four Pens
The central episode of the day is the killing of four antelope swimming the river around 11 o’clock. Ordway gives it the fullest treatment, noting that the meat was promptly butchered at a midday halt:
at 11. oClock we Saw a flock of Goats Swimming the River towards the South Shore, one of our hunters ran up the Shore & killed 4 of them we took them on board the Boat & pearogues… dressed & took care of our Goat meat as we had no other fresh meat on hand, found it to be verry Sweet Good meat
Gass compresses the same scene almost to a headline — “About 11 we saw some goats swimming the river, when one of our hunters ran up the shore and killed four of them” — and Whitehouse’s phrasing tracks Gass nearly word for word: “about 11 oClock we Saw Some Goats Swimming the river. one of our hunters Shot 4 of them.” The close verbal parallel between Gass and Whitehouse is characteristic of their relationship throughout the journals; Whitehouse repeatedly produces sentences that read as condensed echoes of Gass’s text, suggesting either shared drafting habits or direct copying at the end of the day.
Clark, by contrast, reaches for a different register. Where the enlisted men write “goats,” Clark glosses the term: “Saw a large herd of Cabra or antelopes Swiming the River.” His use of the Spanish-derived cabra alongside the more scientific antelopes — and his note that the animals “were not fatt” — points to the captain’s habitual effort to translate field vocabulary into something approaching natural-history description. He alone records the white brant in a flock of thirty otherwise dark birds, and promises “a Discription of this kind of Gees or Brant Shall be given here after.” These are details the sergeants miss or omit.
The Creek-Name Problem
The day’s most revealing divergence is in stream names. Gass and Whitehouse agree precisely: a creek on the north side called Hidden Creek, and a creek on the south side called White Goat Creek. Ordway flips one of these, naming the north-side creek White Goat Creek:
passed a Creek on N. S. called White Goat Creek… passed high Black Bluff on N. S. & a large Bottom covered with Timber
Clark, writing independently, uses neither name. He records an unnamed small creek on the larboard side early in the day and then christens a later south-side stream White Brant Creek after the unusual pale bird he had just seen: “at the head of this Isd. a large Creek coms in on the L. S. Saw white or Brants, we Call this Creek white Brant Creek.” The stream Clark named survived on later cartography — it appears as White Brant Creek on the Missouri River Commission map — while the sergeants’ “White Goat” and “Hidden” never took hold. The episode illustrates how a captain’s nomenclature, recorded with the implicit authority of command, could supersede the parallel naming the enlisted journalists were doing in their own notebooks.
What Each Narrator Sees
Beyond names, the entries differ in what each man finds worth recording. Clark notes the three Teton men who called from shore and “beged Some Tobacco” — a diplomatic encounter Ordway, Gass, and Whitehouse all omit, though Ordway mentions “Sev-eral Indians on the Shore” earlier in the morning. Clark also describes the landscape in geological terms (“many of the Bluffs have the appearance of being on fire”) and closes with the social detail that he “refreshed the men with a glass of whiskey,” something the men themselves do not mention. Ordway, characteristically, attends to logistics: the dressing of the meat, the timbered bottom where the party dined, and Clark’s afternoon hunt that produced a deer with two more wounded and lost. Gass strips everything to essentials. Whitehouse, briefest of all, adds only the meteorological note of “Some whight frost last night.”
Read together, the four entries for October 5 form a small case study in how a single river day refracts through different observers: Clark naming and classifying, Ordway logging the day’s economy of meat and miles, Gass producing a terse public-facing version, and Whitehouse shadowing Gass with minor additions of his own.
