September 11, 1806 finds the Corps of Discovery descending the Missouri at speed, somewhere below the mouth of the Nadawa River. The day’s three surviving accounts — by Captain William Clark, Sergeant John Ordway, and Sergeant Patrick Gass — describe the same sequence of events: a delayed morning start, a midday halt for hunting, deer killed, and an island camp. Yet the three entries diverge sharply in length, observational range, and what each narrator deems worth preserving.
The Same Day, Three Registers
Gass offers the most compressed account, dispensing with the day in two sentences. He notes the afternoon hunt, “two deer and a turkey,” and the island camp at sunset. Ordway, working in his customary middle register, expands the same skeleton with botanical and subsistence detail:
found pappaws and grapes in this bottom which is covred with cotten Honey Locus Seckamore timber &C. the rushes thick. Drewyer killed a large deer, we then procd on one of the hunters killed a deer from his canoe, at dusk we Camped on a Sand beach on the N. Side.
Ordway names Drouillard specifically and preserves the small, vivid detail of a hunter shooting a deer from his canoe — a glimpse of the descent’s tempo that neither captain records. Where Gass writes “two deer,” Ordway gives us two distinct kills with circumstance.
Clark, by contrast, produces an entry of nearly four hundred words that ranges across hydrology, hunting yields, river hazards, entomology, and natural history. He confirms the same hunt — “Sent out 6 hunters they killed and brought in two Deer only” — explaining what the sergeants leave implicit: the party hunted because “that which we killed a fiew days past being all Spoiled.” Clark also supplies the river geography Ordway and Gass omit, noting that the Nemahar “was low and did not appear as wide as when we passed up” and that “Wolf river Scercely runs at all.”
What Only Clark Notices
Two observations in Clark’s entry have no counterpart in the sergeants’ journals. The first is an entomological puzzle:
the mosquitoes are no longer troublesome on the river, from what cause they are noumerous above and not So on this part of the river I cannot account.
This is the captain in his characteristic mode — registering a phenomenon, admitting his inability to explain it, and leaving the question open. The sergeants, less concerned with causation, simply stop mentioning mosquitoes.
The second is the entry’s most memorable passage, a moment of acoustic mistaken identity that briefly populates the empty river with imagined civilization:
Wolves were howling in different directions this evening after we had encamped, and the barking of the little prarie wolves resembled those of our Common Small Dogs that 3/4 of the party believed them to be the dogs of Some boat assending which was yet below us.
The detail is revealing on multiple levels. It captures the expedition’s growing anticipation of contact with traders or settlements as they near the lower Missouri — three-quarters of the men are listening for boats. It also shows Clark functioning as naturalist, distinguishing the prairie wolf (coyote) from the larger gray wolf, and noting that he has “frequently taken notice of” the resemblance “on this as also the other Side of the Rocky mountains.” Neither Gass nor Ordway preserves the incident, though all three men presumably heard the same howling.
Pawpaws and the Lower Missouri Bottoms
One small convergence ties Ordway and Clark together against Gass: both note pawpaws. Ordway records finding “pappaws and grapes” at the noon halt; Clark closes his entry with the terse observation that “The papaws nearly ripe.” The fruit is a marker of latitude and season — the party has descended far enough south, and the calendar has advanced far enough into autumn, that the bottomland forests now offer a food the upper river never did. Gass, who tends to compress vegetation into background, lets the detail pass.
Taken together, the three entries demonstrate the stratification of expedition record-keeping in its final weeks. Gass writes for narrative economy, Ordway for the texture of daily subsistence, and Clark for the broadest possible documentary net — geography, supply, fauna, and the small human moment of men straining to hear dogs that were never there.
