May 20, 1804 marks the day Meriwether Lewis caught up with William Clark and the assembled party at St. Charles, the small French village on the Missouri’s north bank where the expedition had been waiting since the 16th. The five surviving journal entries from this Sunday offer a striking case study in how unevenly the same day could be recorded — Lewis devotes hundreds of words to the journey and the village; Floyd disposes of it in six.
A Captain’s Arrival, in Five Registers
Lewis’s entry is the longest and most literary of the day, and it is essentially a travel narrative. He records the 10 a.m. departure from St. Louis with Captain Stoddard, Lieutenants Milford and Worrell, Auguste Chouteau, Charles Gratiot, and “many other respectable inhabitants,” the affectionate parting from Madame Pierre Chouteau (“that excellent woman”), the five miles of prairie encircling St. Louis, and the violent thunderstorm from the northwest that drove the party into a roadside cabin at half past one. He pushes on through the rain and arrives at half past six to join Clark and find “the party in good health and sperits.”
Clark’s entry, written from the receiving end, confirms the arrival but compresses the social pageant into a roster of names — “Mssr. Lutenants Minford & Werness. Mr. Choteau Grattiot, Deloney, Laber Dee Ranken Dr. SoDrang” — several of whom Lewis does not bother to list. Clark also supplies operational detail Lewis omits: he was “writeing Rolls,” one man was sick, and the lost letter from the previous day had been recovered:
The letter George lost yesterday found by a Country man, I gave the party leave to go and hear a Sermon to day delivered by Mr. ____ a romon Carthlick Priest at 3 oClock
The blank where the priest’s name should appear is characteristic Clark — the willingness to leave a placeholder rather than guess.
The Enlisted Men and the Mass
The three enlisted journalists converge on a single subject: the Catholic Mass that Clark had given them leave to attend. Ordway writes tersely, “to the Mass, & saw them perform &C.” Whitehouse’s version is almost word-for-word an expansion of Ordway’s:
Several of the party went to church, which the french call Mass, and Sore [saw] their way of performing &c.
The dependence is plain — Whitehouse adds the gloss “which the french call Mass” but otherwise preserves Ordway’s framing and the closing “&c.” This is consistent with the documented pattern of Whitehouse drawing on Ordway’s journal as a base text. Neither man comments on the content of the service, only on its foreignness; the Mass is treated as an ethnographic curiosity, something performed by the French rather than worshipped in.
Floyd, by contrast, simply writes:
nothing worth Relating to day
Whether Floyd skipped the service, found it unremarkable, or was simply uninterested in transcribing what Ordway had already noted, his dismissal stands as a reminder that the journal-keepers’ silences are themselves data. The arrival of Lewis — which Lewis treats as the central event — does not register for Floyd at all.
What Only Lewis Preserves
The most valuable single contribution of the day is Lewis’s geographic and demographic sketch of St. Charles, which appears nowhere else in the day’s record. He fixes the village’s position (“on the North bank of the Missouri 21 Miles above it’s junction with the Mississippi”), describes its single mile-long street running parallel to the river, notes the bench of small hills behind it that gives the place its French name petit Côte, and tallies its built environment:
The Vilage contains a Chappel, one hundred dwelling houses, and about 450 inhabitants; their houses are generally small and but illy constructed; a great majority of the inhabitants are miserably pour
This is the kind of set-piece description Lewis would produce repeatedly across the journey, and it is notable that he writes it on the very evening of his arrival, before retiring to the barge. Clark, who had been in St. Charles for four days, never produces such a description — his focus stays on rolls, discipline, and the sick list. The division of narrative labor that would shape the rest of the expedition is already visible: Lewis the describer, Clark the manager, and the enlisted men recording, often from each other, the surfaces of the days.
