The entries for September 15, 1806 offer a striking case study in narrator register. The Corps of Discovery passed the mouth of the Kansas River around 11 A.M., paused to gather pawpaws, killed an elk on an island, and camped a short distance above Hay Cabin Creek. All three journalists present—Patrick Gass, John Ordway, and William Clark—record the day, but their entries differ so dramatically in length and emphasis that they almost appear to describe different journeys.
Compression Versus Expansion
Gass condenses the entire day into a single sentence:
early. Ina short time we killed a fine large elk; at 11 o’clock passed the Kanzon river, and encamped at sunset.
Three events—elk, river mouth, camp—frame the whole. Gass’s spelling of “Kanzon” preserves a phonetic rendering distinct from Ordway’s “Kanzas” and Clark’s “Kanzas,” suggesting Gass either heard the name differently or did not consult the captains’ notebooks before recording.
Ordway’s entry, by contrast, is observationally dense. He notes the headwind “as usal,” specifies that the elk was “a buck” shot “from their canoe on the lower point of an Isld,” and adds a second buck shot from a canoe later in the day. Ordway is also the only narrator to give a count of game seen but not taken—”about 20 deer on the shores this day”—and the only one to record the rattlesnake episode at the pawpaw grove:
an emence Site of pappaws & as the men were gathering them Saw a number of rattle Snakes and killed one of them and saved the skin.
Clark mentions the pawpaw stop in passing—”we landed one time only to let the men geather Pappaws or the Custard apple of which this Country abounds, and the men are very fond of”—but says nothing of snakes. The detail is Ordway’s alone, consistent with his pattern throughout the return voyage of recording incidents involving the enlisted men that the captains either omit or generalize.
Clark the Surveyor and Climatologist
Where Ordway counts and Gass compresses, Clark interprets. His entry is the longest of the three and is structured around two extended digressions that have no parallel in the other journals. The first is a reconnaissance of military terrain:
about a mile below we landed and Capt Lewis and my Self assended a hill which appeared to have a Commanding Situation for a fort, the Shore is bold and rocky imediately at the foot of the hill, from the top of the hill you have a perfect Command of the river
Neither Gass nor Ordway records this ascent, though it occupied both captains and presumably required the boats to wait. The omission is telling: the hill’s strategic value was a captains’ concern, not a sergeant’s, and the enlisted journalists had no reason to log it.
Clark’s second digression is climatological. He observes that the party is no longer “tormented by the Musquetors” as it had been above the Platte, and offers a meteorological explanation for the discomfort the men feel in the lower river:
Comeing out of a northern Country open and Cool between the Latd. Of 46° and 49° North in which we had been for nearly two years, rapidly decending into a woody Country in a wormer Climate between the Latds. 38°& 39° North is probably the Cause of our experiencing the heat much more Senceable than those who have Continued within the parralel of Latitude.
This is Clark in scientific mode, framing bodily sensation as a problem of latitude and acclimatization. Ordway registers the same general fact—the wind is “a head as usal”—but offers no analysis. Gass says nothing of weather at all.
Convergences and a Missing Scene
The three accounts agree on the essentials: an early start, the Kansas River passed at 11, an elk killed, sunset camp. Clark and Ordway agree the elk was a buck and that it was taken on an island; Clark names the hunters as “the 2 fields and Shannon,” a specificity Ordway lacks. Gass alone calls the animal “a fine large elk” without naming hunters or location.
Notably, the editorial footnote attached to Ordway’s entry reports that Clark elsewhere placed the camp on an island and noted the men “received a dram and Sung Songs untill 11 oClock at night in the greatest harmoney.” That convivial scene appears in none of the three entries transcribed here—a reminder that any single day in the expedition’s record is assembled from overlapping but incomplete fragments, and that the cheerful camp on the lower Missouri survives only because one narrator, on one occasion, chose to write it down.
