The Fourth of July 1804 found the Corps of Discovery somewhere above present-day Leavenworth, Kansas, marking the twenty-eighth anniversary of American independence with cannon fire, a newly named creek, and — per the curated record — an extra gill of whiskey. Two enlisted journalists, Sergeant Patrick Gass and Sergeant John Ordway, both committed the day to paper, and the contrast between their accounts illuminates how differently expedition narrators could process a shared experience.
Two Registers, One Day
Gass’s entry is characteristically compact, almost a logbook of motion and event. He compresses the entire day into a single sentence-chain: a creek passed, a dinner stop, a snake bite, another creek named, an encampment, a salute. His prose is functional, ordered around the boat’s progress:
passed a creek on the north side, which we called INDEPENDENCE, encamped on the north side at an old Indian village situated in a hand-some prairie, and saluted the departing day with another gun.
Ordway, by contrast, lingers. Where Gass notes only that “one of our people got snake bitten but not dangerously,” Ordway names the man and locates the incident geographically:
a Snake bit J° Fields on the out side of his foot, this was under the hills near the praries on the South Side
The identification of Joseph Fields — corroborated by the curated record — is the kind of specificity Gass habitually omits. Gass tends to render the men as a collective (“one of our people”), while Ordway, writing closer to the rank-and-file, more readily individuates them.
Naming the Creek, Firing the Gun
Both sergeants record the christening of Independence Creek, but they frame it differently. Gass presents the name as a collective decision (“which we called INDEPENDENCE”) and capitalizes the word for emphasis — a rare typographic flourish in his spare prose. Ordway preserves the deliberative moment and attributes the act to the captains:
as it has no name & as it is the 4 of July, Capts name it Independence Creek
Ordway’s version aligns more closely with the curated summary drawn from Clark’s journal, which records the captains’ agency in the naming. He also doubles the artillery salute that Gass mentions only once, noting cannon fire both morning and evening:
we fired our Bow piece this morning & one in the evening for Independance of the U. S.
Gass collapses this into a single “gun” saluting “the departing day.” Whether Gass simply omitted the morning salute or condensed the two firings for narrative economy is impossible to determine, but the discrepancy is a useful reminder that even basic factual details vary across the journals of a single day.
The Prairie as Landscape
The most striking divergence is aesthetic. Gass calls the campsite a “handsome prairie” — two words, and he moves on. Ordway opens into something approaching rapture:
we camped in the pla[i]ns one of the most beautiful places I ever saw in my life, open and beautifully Diversified with hills & vallies all presenting themselves to the River.
This is one of the more lyrical passages in Ordway’s early journal and parallels Clark’s noted attention to the landscape’s settlement potential. Ordway also records natural-history details Gass passes over entirely: the “large lake” on the north side (later identified by editors as Sugar or Bean Lake), the great numbers of beaver reportedly found there, and the “nomber of Goslins half grown” — the same goslings that prompted Clark to name the body of water Goslin Lake.
Gass, working from notes that would later be heavily edited by David McKeehan for publication, tends toward the summary view. Ordway, writing for himself, accumulates the textures of the day: the geography of the snake bite, the deliberation behind the creek’s name, the morning gun, the goslings, the diversified valleys. Read together, the two entries demonstrate why cross-narrator comparison is essential to reconstructing any single day of the expedition — neither voice alone captures the Fourth of July on the Missouri in 1804.
