The journal entries for July 7, 1804 offer one of the clearest early demonstrations of how information moved among the expedition’s writers. Four narrators — William Clark, John Ordway, Patrick Gass, and Charles Floyd — describe a single day on the Missouri near the St. Michael (St. Michel) prairies, and the textual overlaps reveal a working economy of shared observation, borrowed phrasing, and individual emphasis.
A Shared Simile, A Shared Source
The most striking convergence is the prairie description. Ordway writes that the St. Michel prairies
has much the appearance from the river of farms Divided by narrow Strips of woods those Strips of timber grows along the runs which rise on the hills, & pass to the River.
Clark’s entry contains nearly identical phrasing:
those Praries has much the appearance from the river of farms, Divided by narrow Strips of woods those Strips of timber grows along the runs which rise on the hill & pass to the river
The wording is too close to be coincidental. Either Ordway copied from Clark’s field notes (the more common direction), or both men drew on a shared verbal observation made aloud during the day’s travel. Clark’s second draft of the entry refines the simile slightly — “verry much the appearence of farms” — and adds the place-name “St. Michul,” suggesting a polishing pass after consultation. Gass, by contrast, compresses the same scene to a single phrase: “a high handsome prairie on the north side.” Floyd omits the prairie entirely. The hierarchy of detail tracks roughly with literacy and rank: Clark and Ordway elaborate; Gass abbreviates; Floyd records only the essentials of navigation.
The Swift Water and the Cordelle
All four men note the morning’s struggle against fast current. Floyd’s terse account —
passed some Strong water on the South Side, which Compelled us to Draw up by the Cord
— is echoed almost verbatim by Clark:
passed Some verry Swift water on the L. S. which Compelled us to Draw up by the Cord.
Floyd, the youngest sergeant and least practiced writer, appears to be either copying from Clark or sharing a common dictation. Ordway, characteristically independent, mentions the swift water only obliquely (“waters on the South side”) and instead devotes his entry to a personal episode: he was detached with the horses on shore, crossed a creek, and could not rejoin the boat that night.
Ordway’s separation produces the day’s most distinctive piece of writing — and a small monument to authorial vanity:
as this creek is without name & my Describing it to my Cap4 he named it Ord-way Creek.
None of the other journalists mention the naming. Ordway alone preserves it, and it survives in his journal as a private satisfaction the captains’ official record did not bother to log.
The Sunstruck Soldier and the Wood Rat
Three narrators note that Robert Frazer fell ill from heatstroke. Ordway is briefest: “one man taken sick (Frasier).” Clark, in his first draft, writes that the man was “Struck with the Sun”; in the fair-copy version he adds the medical response:
Capt. Lewis bled him & gave Niter which has revived him much.
The detail appears nowhere else, and it is one of the earliest journal references to Lewis’s role as expedition physician. Gass and Floyd say nothing of Frazer at all — Floyd because his entry is uniformly skeletal, Gass because his published narrative tends to filter out individual misfortunes in favor of natural-history observation.
Indeed, Gass is the only narrator to describe the wood rat with any taxonomic curiosity:
The principal difference between it and the common rat is, its having hair on its tail.
Clark notes simply, “Saw a large rat on the Side of the bank.” Gass — whose 1807 published Journal was edited for a reading public — instinctively reaches for the comparative detail a naturalist’s audience would expect. Clark, writing for himself and Lewis, does not.
The day’s evening thunderstorm, George Drouillard’s report of young swans on a pond passed the previous day, and the missing horse party are recorded only by Clark. Taken together, the four entries demonstrate the expedition’s documentary layering: Clark as the synthesizing center, Ordway as the independent parallel voice, Gass as the natural-history popularizer, and Floyd as the laconic logbook keeper.
