April 17, 1805 found the Corps making twenty-six miles under a fair wind on the Missouri above the mouth of the Little Missouri. All four journalists — Lewis, Clark, Gass, and Ordway — describe a day of abundant game, burnt hills shedding pumice into the river, and unmistakable signs of recent Assiniboin presence. Read together, the entries form a useful test case in how the expedition’s narrators distributed labor, shared phrasing, and diverged in detail.
The Lean Buffalo at Dinner
The central episode of the day is a midday halt at which buffalo were killed but found too poor to use. Lewis tells the story in the first person and with characteristic self-deprecation:
at the place we halted to dine on the Lard. side we met with a herd of buffaloe of which I killed the fatest as I concieved among them, however on examining it I found it so poar that I thought it unfit for uce and only took the tongue; the party killed another which was still more lean.
Clark, walking onshore on the opposite bank, did not witness the kill but records it secondhand and in flatter terms: “Capt. Lewis killed 2 Buffalow buls which was near the water at the time of dineing, they were So pore as to be unfit for use.” Clark consolidates Lewis’s two animals into a single sentence and drops the wry detail about choosing what seemed the fattest.
Ordway, traveling with the main party, supplies a third angle: “one of the hunters killed one Capt Lewis killed one large one in a fiew minutes they being poor we took only the tongues of them.” Ordway alone preserves the detail that both tongues — not just one — were taken, and he credits an unnamed hunter with the first kill rather than “the party.” Gass, by contrast, compresses the episode beyond recognition: “two men went out and in a few minutes killed 2 buffaloe,” omitting Lewis’s participation and the animals’ poor condition entirely. The phrase “in a few minutes” appears in both Gass and Ordway, a small verbal echo suggesting one sergeant glanced at the other’s notes — or that both drew on a shared oral report at camp.
Assiniboin Signs and the Captains’ Shared Sentence
The clearest evidence of direct textual borrowing on this date lies in the captains’ parallel descriptions of Indian sign. Lewis writes that Clark “informed me that he had seen the remains of the Assinniboin encampments in every point of woodland through which he had passed.” Clark’s own entry recasts the same observation almost verbatim: “Saw the remains of Indian camps in every point of timbered land on the S. S.” The shared formula “in every point of [woodland/timbered land]” confirms that one captain consulted the other when writing up the day — a pattern familiar throughout the journals, though the direction of copying here is ambiguous.
Both captains then converge on the evening’s discovery of four rafts and fresh tracks. Lewis: “they left four rafts of timber on the Stard. side, on which they had passed. we supposed them to have been a party of the Assinniboins who had been to war against the rocky mountain Indians.” Clark: “Saw Some fresh Indians track and four rafts on the shore S. S. Those I prosume were Ossinniboins who had been on a war party against the Rockey Mountain Indians.” Neither sergeant mentions the rafts at all — a striking omission given the security implications, and a reminder that Gass and Ordway tend to record what the working party did rather than what the captains inferred.
What Each Narrator Notices Alone
Each journalist preserves details the others miss. Gass alone reports that “some rain had fallen during the day, where we encamped, though there was none where we had been” — a localized weather observation Clark gestures at only obliquely with his “thunder gust” from the southwest. Ordway is the day’s natural historian of small things: he alone notes the morning’s beaver and “Several Small fish,” the catfish caught at the sand-beach camp, and the “red hills” and “high raged hills which are rough barron broken & Steep.”
Clark, walking the shore, supplies the day’s richest wildlife inventory — antelope, elk, white wolves, and a pond “formed on the S. S. by the Missouries Changeing its bead” holding swan, geese, and ducks. Lewis, meanwhile, devotes a long passage to the bears the party has not seen, weighing Indian warnings against expedition experience: “the Indian account of them dose not corrispond with our experience so far.” He also offers the day’s only culinary judgment, declaring beaver “excellent; particularly the tale, and liver” — a small ethnographic note on the men’s preferences that the other three journalists collapse into Clark’s terser “preferred by the party to any other at this Season.”
Across the four entries, a consistent hierarchy of register emerges: Lewis discursive and reflective, Clark documentary and geographic, Ordway granular and inventorial, Gass concise and labor-focused. April 17 is unremarkable in expedition terms, but precisely for that reason it shows the four voices in their settled working relation.
