By early September 1806 the Corps of Discovery was driving hard down the Missouri, recognizing landmarks they had laboriously ascended more than two years earlier. The entries of 8 September 1806 by Patrick Gass, John Ordway, and William Clark all describe the same stretch of river — the passage of Council Bluffs and the approach to the Platte — but each narrator filters the day through a distinct lens. Read together, the three entries illustrate how differently the expedition’s chroniclers handled a day of geographic recognition.
Anniversary and Memory at Council Bluffs
Both Gass and Clark anchor the day to the site of the 1804 council with the Otos. Gass, characteristically terse, fixes the moment with a precise backward reference:
at 10 o’clock we passed council bluffs where we held the first council with the Ottos on the Ist, 2nd and 3rd of August 1804, and in the evening encamped on a small island, having gone on very well during the day.
Gass treats the bluffs as a calendar entry — a place keyed to a remembered event. Clark, by contrast, records the same passage but lingers. He notes “an old tradeing house on the S W Side a few miles above the Council bluffs,” then describes how he and Lewis disembarked to reassess the site:
at 11 A M we Came too at the bluffs and Capt Lewis and myself walked up on the bluffs and around to examine the Country and Situation more particularly, the Situation appeared to us eaqually as eligable as when we passed up for an establishment, the hill high and Commanding with a high rich bottom of great extent below.
Clark’s entry is forward-looking in a way Gass’s is not. Where Gass commemorates, Clark evaluates — confirming the bluffs’ suitability for a future government “establishment,” a judgment that would, in fact, influence later military siting on the river. Ordway, strikingly, omits Council Bluffs altogether.
The Working River: Ordway’s Eye for Hazard
Ordway’s entry is the shortest of the three and the most practical. He notes a hunter’s success and a navigation hazard:
procd on verry well Gibson killed a deer from his canoe, the logs & Sawyers are pleanty in this part of the Missourie we having made 58 miles this day Camped 12 miles above R. Platte.
The detail about “logs & Sawyers” — submerged or partially submerged trees that menaced river craft — is the kind of observation that rarely surfaces in Gass or Clark for this date, but which mattered enormously to a sergeant managing canoes in fast water. Ordway also reports the day’s mileage as 58 miles, while Clark records 78. Such discrepancies are common between the two and likely reflect different methods of estimation rather than error; Clark, the expedition’s principal cartographer, tended to compute distances more generously and systematically. Gibson’s deer, killed from his canoe, also passes unmentioned by the captains — a reminder that Ordway’s sergeant-level perspective preserved small operational details the officers’ journals abstracted away.
Clark the Geographer: A Hydrological Puzzle
Where Gass commemorates and Ordway records the day’s labor, Clark uses the entry for a sustained piece of geographic reasoning. Having reached the old White Catfish Camp — the party’s bivouac of 22–26 July 1804 — he pauses to consider the river itself:
The Missouri at this place does not appear to Contain more water than it did 1000 Miles above this, the evaperation must be emence; in the last 1000 miles this river receives the water 20 rivers and maney Creeks Several of the Rivers large and the Size of this river or the quantity of water does not appear to increas any-
This is Clark thinking in print. He has tallied tributaries — “20 rivers and maney Creeks” — and observed that the Missouri’s volume has not visibly grown to match. His provisional explanation, evaporation on an “emence” scale, is the sort of speculative natural-philosophical aside that recurs throughout his journals but appears nowhere in Gass or Ordway. Neither sergeant ventures hypotheses about the river’s hydrology; that interpretive register belongs to the captains.
Three Registers, One River
The 8 September entries form a useful triangulation. Gass supplies historical anchoring, Ordway supplies operational texture, and Clark supplies geographic and speculative analysis. None of the three narrators is copying another here — the divergences in detail, mileage, and emphasis indicate independent composition — and the contrast suggests how much is lost when any single journal is read in isolation. The same forty miles of river yielded three quite different documents.
