The passage of the Platte River’s mouth on September 9, 1806, was a navigational landmark the Corps of Discovery had first crossed more than two years earlier on their outbound journey. Returning downstream, three narrators—William Clark, John Ordway, and Patrick Gass—record the day in strikingly different registers, each shaped by rank, role, and the conventions of their respective journals.
Geographic Precision Versus Daily Summary
Clark, ever the cartographer, treats the Platte’s mouth as a hydrographic event worth detailed notice. He observes that the river is low, its water ‘nearly clear,’ and its current ‘turbelant as usial,’ before turning to the morphology of the Missouri itself:
the Sand bars which Choked up the Missouri and Confined the river to a narrow Snagey Chanel are wastd a way and nothing remains but a fiew Small remains of the bear which is covered with drift wood, below the R. Platt the Current of the Missouri becomes evidently more rapid than above and the Snags much more noumerous and bad to pass
This is the captain’s eye: comparing the river’s present state to its appearance in 1804, noting where bars have eroded, where snags now threaten. Ordway, by contrast, dispatches the same passage in a single clause: ‘Soon passed the mouth of River platte and procd on verry well all day without making making any delay, having made 74 miles this day.’ For the sergeant, the Platte is a milestone primarily because it helps tally distance.
Gass’s published narrative is the briefest of the three on the 9th, recording only that the party ‘passed the mouth of the great river Platte; went on very well all day, and at night encamped on a sand beach opposite the Bald-pated prairie.’ The phrasing ‘went on very well’ echoes Ordway closely enough to suggest either a shared idiom among the sergeants or Gass’s editor smoothing the original field notes into conventional travel prose.
Mileage, Camps, and a Telling Discrepancy
The two sergeants and the captain agree on the camp—opposite the Bald-pated prairie—but differ on the day’s mileage. Ordway logs 74 miles; Clark records 73. The one-mile discrepancy is minor, but it illustrates how the expedition’s distance estimates were independently compiled rather than copied from a single authoritative source. Clark also anchors the camp in expedition memory, noting it lay ‘imediately opposit our encampment of the 16th and 17th of July 1804’—a retrospective gesture absent from both sergeants’ entries.
Ordway adds one sensory detail neither Clark nor Gass mentions for this date: ‘the Musquetoes Scarse.’ Clark, writing more expansively, complicates this in his own entry, observing that the mosquitoes are ‘yet troublesom, tho not So much So as they were above the River platt.’ The two are not contradictory so much as calibrated to different thresholds of annoyance.
The Captain’s Interior Register
Where the sergeants confine themselves to navigation and weather, Clark allows himself a passage of feeling that has no parallel in Ordway or Gass for this date:
our party appears extreamly anxious to get on, and every day appears produce new anxieties in them to get to their Country and friends.
He follows this with a note on Lewis’s recovery from the August 11 hunting accident: ‘My worthy friend Cap Lewis has entirely recovered his wounds are heeled up and he Can walk and even run nearly as well as ever he Could.’ Neither sergeant remarks on Lewis’s condition, and indeed Lewis himself was not keeping a regular journal during this stretch of the return. Clark’s entry thus becomes the sole narrative witness to the co-captain’s healing—a reminder that for portions of the homeward voyage, Clark’s journal stands alone among the captains’ records.
Clark closes with an observation on climate that again exceeds the sergeants’ interests: the air is ‘more Sultery than I have experienced for a long time,’ and a single thin blanket now suffices at night where two were needed days earlier. Taken together, the three accounts of September 9 show the predictable hierarchy of expedition journaling—sergeants brief and functional, captain expansive and reflective—but they also reveal Ordway’s habit of noting small environmental shifts (the mosquitoes) and Gass’s published prose smoothing field observation into readable travelogue. The Platte is passed three times on this date, in three different keys.
