September 5, 1804 finds the Corps near the mouth of the Niobrara (which the journals call the Poncarre, Ponca, or Poncasar River), pausing on an island long enough to fashion a new cedar mast and to send hunters in several directions. The day produces no single dramatic event, but the five surviving accounts, read together, expose how sharply the narrators differ in what they considered worth preserving.
The Ponca Detour Only Clark Records
Clark alone reports the small diplomatic errand of the day. He dispatches Shields and Gibson up the Ponca River roughly two miles to the Ponca village, finding it empty:
at this time this nation is out hunting the biffalow they raise no corn or Beens, Gibson killed a Buffalow in the Town
The detail is striking — a buffalo killed inside an abandoned village — and it appears in neither Ordway, Gass, nor Whitehouse, all of whom were presumably with the boats. Clark’s second draft adds that Shields also reported black-tailed deer near the village, a small ethnographic and zoological footnote that would have vanished entirely without his double entry. Ordway notes only that two men crossed to hunt and returned with a deer; he appears not to have known, or not to have cared, that they had walked through a Ponca settlement.
Lewis the Naturalist, Alone on the Page
Lewis writes nothing about the mast, the river, the village, or the day’s progress. His entry is purely zoological: a distant sighting of pronghorn antelope above what he calls the “Glauber Salts Springs” — the same mineral seeps Clark, Ordway, and Whitehouse all note on the north side — and a meticulous description of a snake brought in by a hunter:
beautifully variagated with small black spotts of a romboydal form on a light yellow white ground… it has 221 Scuta on the belly and 51 on the tale
The scale count is characteristic Lewis. Where Clark counts villages and rivers, Lewis counts ventral scutes. The antelope, glimpsed too briefly to describe in color, frustrates him; he settles for measuring the track. None of the other four narrators mentions the snake at all, and only Gass and Ordway use the French term cabres or its English equivalent for the antelope. This is the expedition’s first sustained encounter with the pronghorn, and it survives almost entirely in Lewis’s hand.
Ordway, Gass, and the Whitehouse Compression
Ordway gives the fullest enlisted-man’s account: the early start, the south wind, the breakfast halt, the beaver dam across Goat Creek that had backed up a plum-bearing pond, the mineral springs, the 4 o’clock camp, and a precise hunters’ tally — Reuben Fields a fat buck, Drouillard an elk, Newman a fawn elk and a fawn deer. Gass parallels Ordway closely but compresses, attributing kills to anonymous “three men” and “two more” rather than naming them, and adding the detail that the springs issue from “yellow bluffs” — a color note Clark renders as “Blue earth” and Ordway omits.
Whitehouse’s entry is the day’s shortest by a wide margin:
we took a ceeder mast on board Some hunters out we Sailed on passed Goat creek on N. S. where the Beaver had made a damm across the mouth of it. we passed handsome Minneral Springs on the N.S. the hunters killed 2 Elk & a Deer.
The phrasing — Goat Creek, the beaver dam, the mineral springs, the kill count — tracks Ordway’s sequence almost exactly, but stripped of names, times, and the plum trees. The pattern of Whitehouse abbreviating Ordway, well documented elsewhere in the journals, is visible here in miniature.
What the Composite Adds
No single narrator captures the day. Without Clark, the Ponca village vanishes. Without Lewis, the antelope and the snake vanish. Without Ordway, the hunters are nameless and the beaver pond goes unrecorded. Gass supplies the bluff color and the encampment time; Whitehouse confirms the mast was cedar. The island itself receives its name only in Clark’s hand — “No preserves Island,” because here the captains finished the last of their preserved provisions. It is a small domestic detail, easily overlooked, and it reveals something the hunting tallies obscure: by early September the expedition was already living off the country.
