The entries of 21 September 1806 from John Ordway and William Clark document the same events along the lower Missouri — meeting ascending parties of Kickapoos and traders, sighting settlements, and the celebrated arrival at St. Charles — yet the two accounts diverge sharply in social texture and rhetorical register. Read together, they offer a useful case in how rank, audience, and stylistic habit shaped the expedition’s parallel record.
Two Registers of Reunion
Both narrators emphasize that the inhabitants of the lower Missouri settlements believed the Corps had perished. Ordway records the bewilderment plainly:
the people of the Settlements were makeing inqueries of us & were Surprized to See us as they Said we had been given out for dead above a year ago.
He repeats the motif at St. Charles, noting that the townspeople "could hardly believe that it was us for they had heard and had believed that we were all dead and were forgotten." The doubled phrasing — dead and forgotten — gives Ordway’s entry an almost folkloric cadence, the sergeant registering the emotional weight of return.
Clark, by contrast, frames the same recognition through the visual and the social. He notes that "Saw Several persons also Stock of different kind on the bank which reviv’d the party very much," and on approach to St. Charles describes how "the party rejoiced at the Sight of this hospital village plyed thear ores with great dexterity." Where Ordway dwells on the settlers’ astonishment, Clark dwells on the party’s own animation. The captain’s prose is observational and managerial; the sergeant’s is communal.
Salutes, Hosts, and the Sunday Promenade
Both men record the ceremonial arrival. Ordway writes that the Corps "fired three rounds and Camped at the lower end of the Town," a compressed military notation. Clark expands the same moment into a tableau:
this day being Sunday we observed a number of Gentlemen and ladies walking on the bank, we Saluted the Village by three rounds from our blunderbuts and the Small arms of the party, and landed near the lower part of the town.
Clark alone notes that the day is Sunday and that the riverbank promenade is a feature of village leisure — a detail Ordway omits entirely. Clark also alone names hosts: "a Mr. Proulx, Taboe, Decett, Tice Dejonah & Quarie," recording who extended invitations and which two (Proulx and Deucett) the captains were able to visit. Ordway records only that "the most of the party got quarters in Town and refreshments" — the enlisted men’s perspective on the same hospitality, undifferentiated by household.
The contrast is characteristic. Clark, as co-commander, is curating a record of obligations incurred and civilities exchanged; the named gentlemen are future correspondents and creditors of goodwill. Ordway, writing for himself and a probable popular readership, collapses the social register into a single line about quarters and refreshment, and then attends to what Clark omits altogether: the weather. "late in the evening hard rain commend and continued hard during the night," Ordway closes — a detail entirely absent from Clark’s entry, which ends instead with a mileage note and an editorial aside that "The banks of the river thinly Settled &c."
Complementary Silences
Neither account is derivative of the other; the divergences are too consistent. Ordway notes the Indian canoes "mooving up the River" without specifying the nation, while Clark identifies them as "12 canoes of Kickapoos assending on a hunting expedition" and adds the encounter at 3 P.M. with "two large boats assending" — ascending traders Ordway does not mention. Conversely, Ordway’s closing weather observation and his repeated emphasis on the settlers’ disbelief preserve atmospheric and emotional information that Clark’s more administrative entry lets pass.
For the date 21 September 1806, the two journals function as deliberate complements. Clark supplies the ethnographic specificity — names of hosts, identity of the ascending Indians, the Sunday promenade — that the captain’s record was expected to preserve. Ordway supplies the human texture of return: the repeated motif of being thought dead, the hard rain on the first night under a roof in over two years. Used together, they reconstruct an arrival neither entry, alone, fully conveys.
