The events of August 7, 1804, near the mouth of the Soldier River turn on a single command: four men were sent back down the Missouri to apprehend Moses B. Reed, who had slipped away from the expedition three days earlier under the pretense of retrieving a forgotten knife. The four surviving accounts of this dispatch — by Captain William Clark, Sergeants Patrick Gass and Charles Floyd, and Private Joseph Whitehouse — diverge sharply in what each narrator chose to preserve, exposing a hierarchy of information access within the Corps of Discovery.
The Order and Its Recording
Clark, as co-commander, provides the fullest official record. He names the detail, specifies the lethal contingency, and outlines the diplomatic mission grafted onto the manhunt:
at 1 oClock dispatched George Drewyer, R. Fields, Wm. Bratten & Wm. Labieche back after the Deserter reid with order if he did not give up Peaceibly to put him to Death &c. to go to the Ottoes Village & enquire for La Liberty and bring him to the Mahars Village, also with a Speech on the occasion to the Ottoes & Missouries
Gass, writing as a sergeant with access to the captains’ intentions, condenses the order to its disciplinary core: the men were to take Reed “dead or alive, if they could see him.” The phrasing echoes Clark’s “put him to Death” but strips away the parallel diplomatic errand. Gass treats the dispatch as a matter of internal discipline rather than statecraft.
Whitehouse, by contrast, names the four men — “G. Druier, R. fields, Bratton, And William [Labiech]” — but offers no commentary on the lethal authorization, closing instead with the formulaic “Nothing Else happend Extraordinary this day.” His list of names matches Clark’s exactly, suggesting either direct communication of the roster or copying from a shared source.
Floyd, also a sergeant, devotes his longest entry of the stretch to Reed, but turns retrospective: he reconstructs the desertion of August 4, the discovery of the missing powder and balls, and the pursuit only as the culmination of an unfolding offense. His moral judgment is explicit — Reed deserted “with out aney Jest Case” — language absent from the captains’ more procedural framing.
The Pelican Episode and Shared Detail
The following day’s pelican hunt offers a clear case of cross-narrator convergence. Clark records that “Capt Lewis Killed a Pelican on Pelicans Island, at which place maney Hundreds had Collected.” Gass elaborates with the now-famous measurement:
In the bag under the bill and neck of the pelican, which Captain Lewis killed, we put five gallons of water.
Whitehouse repeats the figure almost verbatim — “the Bagg that it carried its drink in containd 5 Gallons of water by Measure” — and adds an observation the others omit: “there was better than 5 or 6000 of them flying they kept before Us one day.” Floyd notes only “Grait Nomber of Pelicans” without the gallon measurement. The five-gallon detail appears to have circulated as a shared anecdote among the enlisted men, with Gass and Whitehouse each incorporating it independently while Floyd, writing more tersely, lets it pass.
Registers of Authority and Hardship
The four entries also differ in what physical hardships they admit. Clark alone dwells on the mosquitoes as a personal torment, recording that he could not keep them “out of my eyes, with a bush” while hunting elk with Collins — a rare first-person admission of bodily discomfort from the captain. Gass mentions mosquitoes twice in three days as “very numerous and troublesome” but in the collective voice of the camp. Whitehouse and Floyd omit the insects entirely on August 7, focusing on river distance, wind direction, and game.
Floyd’s distinctive contribution is geographic: he alone characterizes the terrain on August 8, noting “the Land is Low march Land that on the South is prarie Land,” a topographic distinction neither sergeant Gass nor private Whitehouse records. Gass tends toward generalizations about timber and prairie; Whitehouse toward river miles and camp side. Floyd, writing his final entries before his death two weeks later, was developing an eye for the country’s specific texture that the other journals only intermittently match.
Read together, these four accounts of a single command and its aftermath show how rank, audience, and temperament filtered the same events into markedly different records — Clark drafting for posterity and Washington, Gass narrating discipline, Floyd assigning blame, and Whitehouse counting birds.
