The expedition’s return down the Missouri brought the Corps of Discovery, on August 28, 1806, to a familiar bend of the river in present-day South Dakota. Both William Clark and John Ordway record reaching the campsite the party had occupied on September 16 and 17, 1804 — a place they had christened Pleasant Camp for its remarkable abundance of game and fruit. With Meriwether Lewis convalescing from his thigh wound and no longer keeping a journal since August 12, the day’s record falls to Clark and Ordway, whose entries reveal sharply different scales of attention.
Clark’s Specimen-Collecting Agenda
Clark frames the stop as a deliberate scientific operation. He opens with a note on the captain’s condition — “Capt Lewis had a bad nights rest and is not very well this morning” — but quickly turns to the day’s purpose. Before reaching Pleasant Camp, he dispatched Reubin and Joseph Field with explicit instructions to hunt for specimens the expedition still lacked:
Sent out Reubin & Joseph Feild to hunt for the Mule deer or the antilope neither of which we have either the Skins or Scellitens of.
This is the language of a collecting expedition, not merely a meat hunt. Clark goes on to detail a coordinated deployment: Drouillard and Labiche put ashore further down with the same orders; upon landing, Sergeant Pryor, Shields, Gibson, Willard, and Collins were dispatched up Corvus Creek for antelope and mule deer; Bratton and Frazer were sent specifically after barking squirrels; and all parties were instructed to shoot any magpie they encountered. Clark’s recollection of the 1804 camp is correspondingly comprehensive, cataloguing the species that had given the place its name:
the great abundance of Game Such as Buffalow Elk, antilopes, Blacktail or mule deer, fallow deer, common deer wolves barking Squirels, Turkies and a variety of other animals, aded to which there was a great abundance of the most delicious plumbs and grapes.
The day’s results disappointed him. Despite the elaborate division of labor, the hunters returned with only common deer, two buffalo, and two barking squirrels — none of the priority specimens. Clark’s response is to extend the delay, ordering Shannon, Collins, Labiche, and Willard to continue hunting along both banks the following morning while the main party drifts slowly down to the Round Island.
Ordway’s Camp-Level View
Ordway records the same encampment, but his entry compresses the elaborate hunting deployments into a single laconic phrase: “Several hunters went out.” Where Clark itemizes who was sent where with what objective, Ordway attends to what the rest of the party was doing in camp. He notes the men “dressing deer and goat skins to make themselves cloaths,” a domestic detail entirely absent from Clark’s record, and he gives the plum harvest its own moment:
we gathered an emence Site of plumbs which are now ripe and good.
Clark also records the plum-gathering, but characteristically with more social specificity, mentioning that “the Squaws of the enterpreter Jessomme and the Mandan Chief” participated and that the party gathered “more plumbs than the party Could eate in 2 days,” identifying three species. Ordway’s tally of the day’s kill — “2 buffaloe three deer one porcupine and Several bearking Squerrells” — differs slightly from Clark’s accounting and includes a porcupine Clark omits, suggesting Ordway recorded what came into camp while Clark recorded what mattered to the specimen agenda.
Register and Priority
The two entries together illustrate a recurring divide in the expedition’s records. Clark, as co-commander, writes with an eye to the expedition’s official obligations — the gaps in the natural-history collection, the strategic placement of hunters, the scientific identity of a campsite. Ordway, a sergeant whose journal-keeping was likewise official but whose attention is camp-level, registers the texture of the day: ripe plums, men sewing skins, mosquitoes “troublesome.” Clark notably ends his entry remarking that “our Situation is pleasent a high bottom thinly timbered and covered with low grass without misquitors” — directly contradicting Ordway on the insect question, a small but telling reminder that even a single shared campsite could be experienced and recorded differently by men sleeping a few yards apart.
The 1806 return to Pleasant Camp thus functions as a kind of double exposure: the place is the same, the date is the same, but Clark’s lens is the museum cabinet and Ordway’s is the cookfire.
