The entries surviving for September 24, 1806 capture the expedition at a peculiar threshold. The Corps of Discovery has reached St. Louis; the daily ethnographic and geographic observations that filled the outbound journals have given way to errands, letters, and social calls. Only two narrators are represented for this date in the present record, and they could hardly be more different in register: William Clark’s working diary entry, and a stretch of the alphabetical index to John Ordway’s published journal. Read together, they frame the moment when lived experience begins its conversion into archive.
Clark’s Civilian Day
Clark’s entry is domestic in tone and almost entirely administrative. He notes a restless night followed by an early start devoted to correspondence:
I sleped but little last night however we rose early and Commencd wrighting our letters Capt. Lewis wrote one to the presidend and I wrote Govr. Harrison & my friends in Kentucky and Sent of George Drewyer with those letters to Kohoka & delivered them to Mr. Hays
The division of labor is telling. Lewis writes upward, to Thomas Jefferson — the report the President has been awaiting for more than two years. Clark writes laterally and personally, to Governor William Henry Harrison and to friends in Kentucky. George Drouillard, the indispensable hunter and interpreter of the western journey, is here repurposed as a courier to Cahokia (“Kohoka”). The same men who navigated the Bitterroots are now running mail.
Clark then records a dinner with Auguste Chouteau (“Mr. Chotoux”), the patriarch of St. Louis’s mercantile elite, followed by a visit to a store to purchase cloth and arrange with a tailor for new clothes. The detail is small but important: the captains are visibly re-entering a society that expects them to look the part. The buckskin economy of the Plains and the Columbia is being shed, literally, in favor of tailored garments.
The entry closes on a quietly ominous note:
Capt Lewis in opening his trunk found all his papers wet, and Some Seeds spoiled
This single sentence is the only scientific observation in the day’s entry, and it is a record of loss. Whether from the descent of the Missouri, the rains of the lower river, or the jostling of the final days, water has reached Lewis’s trunk. Botanical specimens — seeds gathered as living evidence of the West’s flora — have begun to rot. Clark mentions it without elaboration, but the line foreshadows the curatorial difficulties that would dog the expedition’s natural-history collections for years afterward.
Ordway as Index: The Expedition Becomes Reference
The Ordway material assigned to this date is not a journal entry at all but a portion of the alphabetical index to his published journal — the M’s, running from “Memaloose Islands” through “Montana.” Its inclusion under September 24, 1806 is an artifact of editorial cataloguing rather than authorship; Ordway did not write these entries on this day. Yet juxtaposed with Clark’s letter-writing, the index reads as a kind of parallel transformation.
Where Clark is sealing letters and sending Drouillard to Cahokia, the index shows what the journals will eventually become: a cross-referenced apparatus of places, peoples, and events. Entries such as “Minitaree (Big Belly, Grosventres) Indians, village site, 191-92, 389; Spanish trader with, 21; visit Fort Mandan, 167, 177, 185-87” compress months of contact into a single line. The capture of Sacagawea, the swivel gun left at the Mandan villages, the council of 1804 — all collapse into page numbers.
The index also preserves the multiplicity of names that the captains themselves struggled with in the field. “Mill (Bennets, La beane, Labenile, La Benn, Labunie, un batture la benne) Creek” records, in a parenthesis, the orthographic chaos of a multilingual frontier — French boatmen, American officers, and Indigenous informants each rendering the same waterway differently. Clark’s own variant spellings (“Kohoka,” “Chotoux,” “presidend,” “wrighting”) in the day’s entry belong to the same world the index attempts, retrospectively, to discipline.
Two Registers of Homecoming
The contrast between the two documents is the contrast between event and record. Clark, writing in real time, is a man with damp papers, a tailor’s appointment, and a dinner invitation. The Ordway index, prepared decades later for publication, is the expedition refracted through editorial labor — places fixed to coordinates, tribes to page ranges, rivers to River Commission map sheets. The wet seeds in Lewis’s trunk and the tidy index entry for “Missouri River… sources, 16, 24, 267, 270” represent the two fates of the journey’s evidence: physical specimens vulnerable to weather, and textual data preserved through the apparatus of print.
For September 24, 1806, then, the database holds a single firsthand voice — Clark’s — bracketed by the scholarly machinery that would, generations later, make Ordway’s account searchable. The day itself was quiet. Its documentary legacy was not.
