The reunion with settled country at La Charette on September 20, 1806, produced one of the more emotionally charged moments of the homeward voyage. Comparing the entries of William Clark and John Ordway (Patrick Gass’s daily entry for this date is not preserved in the index fragment available here, though his journal’s index attests to the place’s importance) reveals striking convergence on factual particulars alongside meaningful divergence in tone, detail, and editorial focus.
Shared Facts, Divergent Registers
Both Clark and Ordway anchor their entries on the same sequence of events: the abandonment of canoes because of incapacitated rowers, an early start, the meeting with French trappers ascending the river, the arrival at Charette near sunset, the three rounds of gunfire returned by boatsmen, and the eight-dollar transaction for two gallons of whiskey. The factual scaffolding is essentially identical—evidence that Ordway, as sergeant, was either present at or briefed on the same details Clark recorded as co-commander.
Yet the registers differ sharply. Ordway’s prose is compressed and transactional:
our officers got 2 gallons of Whiskey for which they had to pay eight dollars an extorinatable [extortionate] price they got us some pork Beef and flour &C. the french people gave us Some milk &C. &C.
Clark, writing with an eye toward the eventual official narrative, expands the same episode into a scene with named hosts, social courtesies, and political commentary:
we landed and were very politely received by two young Scotch men from Canada one in the employ of Mr. Aird a Mr. ____ and the other Mr. Reed… we purchased of a Citizen two gallons of Whiskey for our party for which we were obliged to give Eight dollars in Cash, an imposition on the part of the Citizen.
Both narrators flag the whiskey price as excessive—Ordway calls it “extorinatable,” Clark an “imposition”—but only Clark distinguishes between the welcoming Scotch traders and the price-gouging “Citizen,” preserving a social hierarchy of blame that Ordway collapses.
What Each Narrator Notices
Ordway, writing from the ranks, registers the men’s perspective: the milk supplied by French villagers, the practical relief of resupply. Clark, by contrast, devotes substantial paragraphs to matters Ordway omits entirely—the riverine geography of the day’s run (the low Osage, the mouth of the Gasconnade), the technical specifications of the Canadian batteaux, and the political grievances of American settlers in the territory:
The American inhabitants express great disgust for the govermt of this Teritory. from what I can lern it arises from a disapmt. of getting all the Spanish Grants Confirmed.
This is the kind of intelligence-gathering Lewis and Clark were instructed to perform, and Clark performs it even on a day of celebration. Ordway has no such reportorial obligation and accordingly skips the political ethnography.
Clark also captures the emotional texture more fully. The sight of cattle on the bank produces “a joyfull Sight to the party and Caused a Shout to be raised for joy”—a small but telling detail Ordway does not record. Clark notes that locals “informed us that we were Supposed to have been lost long Since, and were entirely given out by every person.” The expedition’s reentry into the world of news, it turns out, came with the discovery that they had been mourned.
Gass and the Indexical Trace
The fragment of Gass’s journal available here is an index rather than a daily entry, but its inclusion of “La Charette—first settlement, citizens cheer” as a discrete entry confirms that Gass, in his published 1807 account, treated this as a landmark moment. The indexical phrasing—”citizens cheer”—matches the public, civic register Gass’s editor David McKeehan favored, and contrasts with Ordway’s plainer “fired three rounds and was answered” and Clark’s more ceremonious “3 rounds with a harty Cheer.” Across all three narrators, the gunfire-and-cheer exchange functions as the symbolic threshold of return.
Pattern
Where Ordway records, Clark contextualizes, and Gass (via his editor) monumentalizes. The same moment becomes, respectively, a logistical note, a piece of frontier reportage, and an indexed civic event. Read together, the three accounts show how a single afternoon at a small French village could be inscribed simultaneously into private, official, and public memory.
