The journal entries for May 30, 1804 offer an instructive case in how four members of the Corps of Discovery handled the same day’s events. The expedition was ascending the lower Missouri, encamping that evening at Grindstone Creek opposite the mouth of the Little Miry. All four narrators agree on the basic shape of the day — a 7 a.m. departure after a hard overnight rain, passage of Monbrun’s Tavern and several creeks, and a violent afternoon hailstorm — but their treatment of detail and incident diverges in revealing ways.
The Mystery of the Guns Below
The most striking divergence concerns an event that occurred before the day’s travel even began. Both Ordway and Clark record gunfire heard the previous evening from downriver. Ordway writes:
a little after dark last night Several Guns were fired below we expect the Frenchmen were firing for Whitehouse who was lost in the woods on N. Side
Clark’s phrasing is nearly identical:
a little after Dark last night Several guns were herd below, I expect the French men fireing for Whitehous who was lost in the woods.
The verbal correspondence between Ordway and Clark — down to the speculative “I expect” / “we expect” — suggests one narrator drew on the other, or both drew on a shared conversation at camp. Gass and Floyd, by contrast, omit the gunfire entirely. Floyd in particular records nothing of Whitehouse’s absence, even though Joseph Whitehouse was a fellow enlisted man. The reason for the lost hunter’s predicament — his exploration of a remarkable cave that delayed his return to the riverbank — surfaces only in Whitehouse’s own journal, not in the four entries here.
Geography and Register
The four narrators use overlapping but inconsistent toponyms for the day’s landmarks. Gass calls the second tributary “Mud creek,” Ordway likewise “Mud creek,” Floyd “Littel muddy River,” and Clark “Big Miry River.” The campsite creek is “Grindstone creek” to Gass and Clark, but Ordway adds the alternative “or Panther Cr.,” while Floyd uses “painter River” — a phonetic rendering of “panther” that betrays his less polished orthography. These small variations illustrate how place-names were still fluid among the company; the men were absorbing French and local Anglo-American names piecemeal and rendering them by ear.
Register also differs sharply. Gass, whose journal was later edited for publication, produces the most orderly prose: complete sentences, ordered clauses, a tidy list of timber species — “cotton wood, sycamore, oak, hickory, and white walnut.” Ordway’s botanical list is nearly identical (“Cottonwood Secamore hickery & white walnut”), again hinting at shared note-taking or post-hoc comparison. Floyd, the least experienced writer of the four, produces shorter, more telegraphic entries with phonetic spellings (“Gratist,” “Colled,” “opset”) and notably less geographic precision.
What Clark Sees That Others Miss
Clark’s entry, as commanding officer’s record, is the most observationally rich. He alone notes the practical hydrology of the day:
the Current Verry Swift river riseing fast … the river Continue to rise, the County on each Side appear full of Water.
This concern with the river’s rise — a navigational hazard for the keelboat and pirogues — is absent from Gass, Ordway, and Floyd, who confine themselves to the storm itself. Clark also gives the most specific measurements: the Big Miry is “about 50 yards Wide,” Grindstone Creek “abt 25 yds.” Such quantitative detail reflects his role as the expedition’s principal cartographer and his habit of recording data others did not.
Taken together, the four entries for May 30 demonstrate the layered nature of the expedition’s documentary record. Gass offers the cleanest narrative, Ordway and Clark share verbal echoes that suggest collaborative recall, Floyd preserves a rougher and more idiosyncratic voice, and Clark alone attends to the river itself as a working problem. No single journal captures the day; the day exists in the relationships among them.
