The expedition’s progress on October 3, 1804, was minimal — perhaps ten river miles against a punishing northwest wind — yet the day produced four distinct journal entries that reveal as much about the narrators’ habits of mind as about the Missouri itself. Read together, the accounts of William Clark, John Ordway, Patrick Gass, and Joseph Whitehouse demonstrate the layered documentary practice that characterizes the Corps of Discovery’s record-keeping.
A Shared Skeleton of Facts
All four narrators agree on the fundamentals: a hard northwest wind that had blown through the night, a delayed or interrupted departure, and a forced halt because of weather and shallow water. Ordway and Whitehouse give nearly identical departure times — Ordway records setting out “past [seven]” while Whitehouse writes that the party “Set off at 1⁄2 past 7 oClock.” Both then describe a midday halt forced by the wind. The close parallel between these two sergeants’ entries is characteristic; throughout the journey, Ordway and Whitehouse frequently produce passages so similar in structure and detail that one likely served as a source or copy-text for the other, or both drew from a shared daily orderly note.
Whitehouse’s description of the landscape —
passed a long range of dark couloured bluffs on S. S. bot-tom & Some timber on the N.S. Camped on the South Side.
— corresponds neatly to Ordway’s “black Bluff S. S.” and “high Bluffs on S. S.” The two sergeants are tracking the same topographic features in the same order, and both end the day camped on the south side. Gass, by contrast, situates the camp at “the mouth of Marrow creek,” supplying a toponym the others omit.
Clark’s Density and Gass’s Compression
Clark’s entry — preserved here in three overlapping draft versions — is by far the richest. Where the sergeants note only weather and miles, Clark adds a vivid domestic vignette of inventory damage:
Several bags Cut by the mice and Corn Scattered, Some of our Cloth also cut by them also papers &c. &c.
The detail is the kind only a commanding officer responsible for stores would think to record, and it is wholly absent from Ordway, Whitehouse, and Gass. Clark’s revision between drafts shows him expanding the account: the brief “at 12 examoned our Stores & goods” of one version becomes, in the fuller draft, a deliberate landing “on a Bare L. S.” to inspect “the Perogus & factle of the boat to see if the mice had done any damage.” The captain is reconstructing not just events but rationale.
Clark also alone records the encounter with the Arikara or Sioux men on the opposite bank:
at 1 oClock an Indian Came to the bank S. S. with a turkey on his back, four others Soon joined him
Ordway notes only that the party “Saw Several Indians opposite on the N. S.” — the wrong bank, by Clark’s reckoning, and stripped of the human particularity of the turkey-bearer. Whitehouse and Gass omit the encounter entirely. Clark’s ornithological eye is also evident: only he records “Brant & white gulls flying Southerly in large flocks,” a seasonal marker the enlisted men do not register.
Gass’s entry is the day’s outlier. Compressed almost to a memorandum, it mentions only that someone “went out and killed a deer” and that the party embarked at five in the afternoon, proceeding six miles. Gass’s published 1807 narrative was edited from his field notes by David McKeehan, and the laconic register here — no weather, no wind, no Indians, no mice — reflects either Gass’s own preference for the hunt-and-mileage essentials or the editorial smoothing that flattened his original observations.
What the Comparison Reveals
The October 3 entries illustrate a recurring pattern in the expedition’s documentary record: Clark functions as the encyclopedic narrator, registering weather, navigation, wildlife, supply problems, and Indigenous encounters in a single dense entry; Ordway and Whitehouse track the day in parallel sergeants’ shorthand, often verbally close; and Gass — at least as transmitted — strips the day to its barest operational core. A reader relying on any one journal would miss most of what happened. The mice in the corn bags survive only because Clark thought to write them down.
