September 3, 1804, on the Missouri in the later Niobrara country. Three published journals in this corpus record the day: Patrick Gass, John Ordway, and William Clark. No published Whitehouse journal for this date survives here. The three who wrote name a plum creek and camp on the south side; they do not keep the same kind of book.
Ordway’s sequence, Gass’s bend
Ordway writes the enlisted log of a travel day: sunrise, wind, landmarks, camp. He leaves at sunrise with the wind from the west, passes a yellow bluff with stone under the bank, rounds a large sand point on the north side, and finds timber scarce on both sides. Then the current and a second bluff:
We proceeded on a Swift current passed a white Chalk Bluff close above
Plumb Creek, on the north side, “formed a vallie between or in the bluff.” Camp:
we Camped on S. S. in a Grove of cottonwood Timber.
He alone of the three puts a note on beaver:
a great many Beaver Sign & Cabbins on the river today.
Gass, in David McKeehan’s 1807 prose, keeps the yellow bluffs and Plumb Creek and the south-side camp, and he agrees that the country is prairie without timber. He does not mention beaver, chalk, sand point, or cottonwood. What he adds is the shape of the river:
Here the river turns at right angles to the left, till it reaches the hills on the south side, then winds gradually to the right.
He is also the only one who climbs for a view. From a hill, a person “may have a view as far as the eye can reach without any obstruction, or intervening object” and, in McKeehan’s wording, “the most delightful prospects.” “Prospects” and “delightful” belong to the printed Gass register; they are not in Ordway or Clark. The same paragraph in the 1807 book carries an antiquarian footnote on ancient fortifications, a Roman empire of the New World, and nations more given to labor than the tribes then living on the river. That note is McKeehan’s, not a field sentence.
Clark’s two drafts
Clark writes the day twice. He sets out at sunrise on a “verry Cold morning,” clear, with little wind from the northwest, and he takes an observation below Plumb Creek — work neither enlisted journal records. He puts the creek’s mouth on the starboard side, between two white banks, and he explains the name by the fruit:
Great quantities of Plumbs of a most delisious flavour, I have collected the Seed of 3 Kinds which I intend to Send to my brother, also Som grapes of a Superior quallity large & well flavoured
Where Ordway and Gass only name the creek, Clark samples it and plans a shipment to his brother. The second draft gives the creek as twelve yards wide, records an observation of the sun’s altitude from a bluff below the mouth, and adds that the white banks “appear to Continu on both sides of the river.” He notes the river rising a little, crowded with sand bars in the second draft, and game the others omit: wild goats in the plains, “wild & fleet,” with elk and buffalo “verry plenty.” On timber he and Gass agree — scarcely any except in the river points — while Ordway still finds a cottonwood grove large enough to camp in.
Clark alone tracks the two men ahead. The first draft:
Saw Some Signs of the 2 men who are a head, Colter has not over taken Shannon
The revised draft names them and sharpens the order: “Shannon appeared to be a head of Colter.” That is a field note being cleaned, not a second event. George Shannon’s long absence begins, in this corpus, in a sentence Ordway and Gass do not write.
Three jobs of attention
The overlapping day is short: a cold morning, a plum creek, a south-side camp, little timber. Ordway and Gass add yellow bluffs. Ordway also keeps current, wind, chalk, beaver cabins, and cottonwood. Gass keeps the right-angle bend, the two-mile spacing of the hills, and a hilltop view, then McKeehan’s printed footnote. Clark keeps astronomy, fruit, grapes, goats, elk, buffalo, and Colter still behind Shannon. Three genres of document from the same miles.
