June 2, 1804 finds the Corps halted at the confluence of the Osage and Missouri rivers, a layover dictated by Lewis’s need for celestial observations. The five surviving entries for the day form a near-perfect demonstration of how information traveled — and degraded — through the expedition’s chain of journal-keepers.
One measurement, five copies
Clark, working with instruments, produces the day’s authoritative document. He records the Missouri at 875 yards, the Osage at 397, the distance between the two rivers eighty poles upstream at forty poles, and the height of the point of land at roughly 100 feet. He notes Lewis’s octant work explicitly:
Meridean altitude of Suns U. L. with Octant, back observation gave for altitude 37° 28″00″. Error of Octant 2° 00′ 00″ +.
Ordway preserves only the river widths — 875 and 397 yards — stripped of method or context, plus the return of the pirogue with “the lost man.” Whitehouse reproduces the same two figures verbatim and adds the operational detail that the men
fell Some trees in the point to open a place for observations
— a small but useful logistical note absent from Clark’s measurement-focused account. The Whitehouse-from-Ordway copying pattern is visible here in the identical phrasing of the river widths, though Whitehouse expands with hunting and labor details Ordway omits.
Gass, characteristically terse, ignores the survey work entirely and treats the day as travel: a deer killed, a 5 p.m. departure, six miles made, camp at Marrow (Murrow) Creek. His entry would not, on its own, indicate that anything unusual happened at this location.
Floyd’s weather, Clark’s grave mounds
Floyd alone preserves the day’s weather sequence —
the for part of the day Clear the Latter part Clouday with thunder and Rain wind from Es
— and he is also the only narrator besides Clark to register topography, noting the “High Cliftes on the Loer Side” of Marrow Creek. Floyd credits Lewis and Drouillard with the deer and a “Grown hog,” a kill the other narrators either fold into a generic count or omit.
Only Clark records the two graves on the high point:
on the top is 2 graves, or mouns, a Delightfull prospect from this hill which Comds. both rivers
. In his expanded second entry he restates them as “Two Mouns or graves” raised on a limestone outcrop. No other narrator mentions the burial features, despite Whitehouse noting that men were felling trees on that very point. The selective survival of this detail — a likely Indigenous burial site at a commanding river junction — depends entirely on Clark’s habit of climbing high ground and writing down what he saw.
The return of Drouillard and Shields
The narrators converge, briefly, on the return of George Drouillard and John Shields, who had been driving horses overland on the north side. Ordway reduces the event to a clause about the pirogue arriving “with the lost man &C.” Clark gives the fullest account: seven days absent, dependent on their guns through mostly rainy weather, forced to
raft or Swim many Creeks
, and arriving “much worsted.” He also captures their reconnaissance value, recording their report of fine country extending thirty or forty miles parallel to the river, threaded by the two Muddy rivers and “som fine Springs & Streams.”
That intelligence — the first overland scouting report of the expedition to make it into a journal — survives only because Clark wrote it down. Ordway, Whitehouse, Gass, and Floyd preserve no trace of what Drouillard and Shields had seen. The asymmetry is instructive: on a single layover day, the difference between Clark’s notebook and the enlisted men’s is the difference between a surveyed confluence with topographic context, returned scouts with a country report, and a grave site on a commanding hill — versus two river widths and a count of deer.
