The entries of June 7, 1804 offer an unusually clear view of how information traveled among the Corps of Discovery’s journal-keepers. Four narrators — William Clark, Sergeant John Ordway, Sergeant Charles Floyd, and Private Joseph Whitehouse — describe the same sequence of events along the Missouri near the mouth of the Big Manitou Creek: a breakfast halt, an excursion to a salt lick, the killing of three rattlesnakes at a painted rock, and an evening camp at Good Woman’s River where George Drouillard returned with three bears.
Clark’s Detailed Template
Clark’s two parallel entries function as the master document. His field notes record precise compass bearings (N 61° W, S 88° W, S 81° W) and distances, while his expanded entry adds ethnographic and geological observation. He is alone among the four in describing the carved bluff in detail:
a short distance above the mouth of this Creek, is Several Courious Paintings and Carveing in the projecting rock of Limestone inlade with white red & blue flint, of a verry good quallity, the Indians have taken of this flint great quantities.
Clark also quantifies the salt springs with a precision the others lack — “from 4 to 600 Gs. of water for a Bushel of Salt” — and notes that Lewis took “four or five men” up the creek. His attention moves between hydrography, mineralogy, and Native use of the landscape.
Ordway as Intermediary
Ordway’s entry tracks Clark’s structure closely but compresses it. He preserves the breakfast halt, the salt-lick excursion, the painted rock, the snake-killing, and the evening’s bear-hunters — the same narrative spine. He alone among the sergeants identifies the creek’s width: “this Mountain Creek is 30 yds wide at the moulh,” a figure that matches Clark’s “30 yds. Wide at the mouth.” Ordway, however, flattens Clark’s elaborate description of the carved bluff into a single phrase: “We passed a painted part of a projecting Rock.” The phrase “projecting Rock” appears verbatim in Clark’s field notes, suggesting Ordway either heard Clark dictate or had access to the captain’s notes.
Whitehouse echoes Ordway’s compression but introduces independent details. He specifies that the rattlesnakes were “of Different Sorts,” a herpetological observation absent from the other three accounts, and he names Drouillard explicitly as the bringer of “One Old famel & her two Cubbs.” His geographic orientation drifts — he places features on the “N. E. Side” where Clark assigns them to the south — a reminder that the privates’ compass sense was less reliable than the captains’.
Floyd’s Terse Register
Floyd’s entry is the most telegraphic of the four. He preserves the day’s landmarks in sequence — the spring from the cliffs, the “River of the Big Devil,” the painted rock, Good Woman Creek, Drouillard’s bear — but strips the explanatory matter. Where Clark writes of “Courious Paintings and Carveing,” Floyd records only that this was the place “whare the pictures of the Devil and other things” appeared. His phrasing — linking the “Big Devil” creek-name to “the pictures of the Devil” on the rock — preserves a folk-etymological reading that the more cautious Clark avoids. Floyd also specifies the count of three rattlesnakes and the bear at the mouth, agreeing with the others on the quantitative facts but offering nothing about the salt lick excursion at all. For Floyd, Lewis’s side trip apparently did not register as journal-worthy.
Patterns and Divergences
Several cross-narrator patterns emerge. First, the captains’ shared vocabulary — “projecting rock,” “30 yds wide,” “3 Bears” — propagates downward into the sergeants’ and private’s entries, confirming that Clark’s notes (or his oral reports at camp) shaped the enlisted journals. Second, each narrator filters the day through his own interests: Clark the surveyor and ethnographer, Ordway the orderly summarizer, Whitehouse the observer of curiosities, Floyd the brisk list-maker. Third, only Clark records the Native use of the flint quarry — an omission in the enlisted journals that suggests such ethnographic detail was either not communicated to the men or not deemed worth recording by them.
The June 7 entries thus illustrate a small but characteristic feature of the expedition’s documentary record: a single day’s events refracted through four registers, with Clark’s authoritative account serving as the source from which the others draw, abbreviate, and occasionally diverge.
