The 3rd of September 1806 marks one of the expedition’s first substantive reconnections with the wider world it had left more than two years earlier. Below the Calumet Bluffs, the descending party meets an ascending trader — and three of its journal-keepers record the meeting with strikingly different priorities. The contrast among Patrick Gass, John Ordway, and William Clark on this day offers a textbook case of how register, audience, and access to officers shaped the expedition’s documentary record.
Three Scales of the Same Encounter
Gass, whose published journal habitually compresses, gives the meeting a single sentence. He notes that the party “met a Mr. Aird, a trader, who was going up the Missouri, and we encamped with him,” before turning quickly to the evening’s weather: a two-hour gust of “wind and rain, with thunder and lightning.” The trader’s first name, his employer, his cargo, and the news he carried are all absent.
Ordway provides a middle register. He correctly identifies the location below the Calumet Bluffs and supplies operational detail Gass omits — that “Herd” (his phonetic rendering of Aird) commanded “two Batteaux and 18 hands” bound for the “babruleys and yanktons near white Stone River in order to trade with those nations and the Mahars also.” Ordway notes that “Mr Herd informed us of the news of the States &C,” but, as a sergeant rather than an officer, he was evidently not party to the actual conversation and does not attempt to summarize it.
Mr Herd informed us of the news of the States &C a verry hard Storm of wind and hard rain this evening.
Clark, by contrast, devotes the bulk of a long entry to Aird and his news. He alone gives the trader’s full name — “Mr. James Airs from Mackanaw by way of Prarie Dechien and St. Louis” — and identifies his firm as “the house of Dickson & Co. of Prarie de Chian.” Clark records the courteous reception (“the men of these boats Saluted us with their Small arms”), Aird’s illness (“a chill of the agu on him”), and the misfortune that had cost him “the most of his usefull articles” when his boat was sunk by a hailstorm on July 25.
The News Clark Alone Preserves
What makes Clark’s entry indispensable is the catalogue of intelligence Aird relayed — the first substantial political news the captains had received since 1804. Clark lists the items almost in the order Aird seems to have produced them:
he also informed us that Genl. Wilkinson was the governor of the Louisiana and at St. Louis. 300 of the american Troops had been Contuned on the Missouri a fiew miles above it’s mouth… the Spaniards had taken one of the U, States frigates in the Mediteranean, Two British Ships of the line had fired on an American Ship in the port of New York, and killed the Capts. brother. 2 Indians had been hung in St. Louis for murder and several others in jale. and that Mr. Burr & Genl. Hambleton fought a Duel, the latter was killed &c. &c.
Several of these reports were garbled (no U.S. frigate had been taken in the Mediterranean; the Burr–Hamilton duel was already two years old), but the passage is invaluable as a snapshot of frontier rumor in 1806. Clark also notes a personal grief — the destruction by fire of “Mr. Cady Choteaus house and furniture,” for which he writes, “I feel my Self very much Concernd.” That flicker of private feeling is entirely absent from the other journals.
Weather, Geography, and the Hierarchy of Knowledge
All three men agree on the violent storm that followed the meeting. Gass calls it “a violent gust of wind and rain, with thunder and lightning” lasting two hours; Ordway notes “a verry hard Storm of wind and hard rain”; Clark expands it into “a violent Storm of Thunder Lightning and rain from the N W… with hard Claps of thunder and Sharp Lightning which continued untill 10 P M.” Only Clark mentions sheltering in Aird’s tent — “I set up late and partook of the tent of Mr. Aires which was dry” — a domestic detail that again signals his privileged access.
Clark alone supplies the day’s mileage (60 miles), the morning’s sand-blown discomfort, the passage of the Redstone (Vermillion) River, and a navigational observation that the sandbars “are very differently Situated from what they were when we went up.” The entry closes with a warm note on Lewis’s recovery from his thigh wound: “I am happy to find that my worthy friend Capt L’s is so well as to walk about with ease to himself.” Where Gass records an event and Ordway a circumstance, Clark on this day records a reunion — with news, with friends remembered, and with the country he was about to re-enter.
