One River, Five Inventories
The expedition covered roughly eleven to thirteen miles on June 6, 1804, moving past Split Rock Creek, Saline (Salt) Creek, and camping on the north bank near what several narrators call Good Woman Creek. The day’s geography is consistent across all five journals, but the details each narrator chose to record diverge sharply.
Clark, recovering from illness he openly notes —
I am Still verry unwell with a Sore throat & head ake
— nonetheless produces the longest and most quantitative entry. He documents the mended mast, the 7 a.m. departure, compass bearings leg by leg, and a striking piece of frontier chemistry from Saline Creek:
one bushel of water will make 7 lb. of good Salt
He also records Lewis taking a meridian altitude of the sun’s upper limb at 37° 6′ 0″ with the octant, noting the instrument’s customary 2° error. None of the other narrators preserve the latitude observation.
Ordway compresses the same passage into four sentences, mentioning the “hole of the Split Rock River” and noting that
Salt has been made their
— a brief acknowledgment of prior Euro-American or Indigenous salt production at the lick that Clark elaborates with yields and distances. Gass, characteristically, gives the river’s width (300 yards) and the strength of its current, then preserves something the others omit entirely:
This day going round some drift wood, the stern of the boat became fast, when she immediately swung round, and was in great danger; but we got her off without much injury.
Clark alludes obliquely to the difficulty — “the water excessivly Strong, So much So that we Camped Sooner than the usial time to waite for the pirogue” — but Gass alone narrates the near-grounding as a discrete incident.
Floyd’s Pictographs and a Whitehouse Date Slip
Floyd, whose journals will end with his death in August, contributes a detail no other narrator records on this date: a rock on the north side
whare the pictures of the Devil and other things
were inscribed, near which the party killed three rattlesnakes. The “River of the Big Devil” he names corresponds to the feature Whitehouse and Clark describe in less colorful terms. Floyd also credits George Drouillard with killing a bear — “George Druer Kild one Bar” — at the camp’s mouth.
Whitehouse’s entry presents a documentary puzzle. He opens with a brief June 6 note (Led Creek, Little Good Woman Creek, camp on the north side), then immediately runs into an entry headed
Thursday 7% Fune 1804
that describes Lewis going to a buffalo lick, three rattlesnakes killed at a large rock, and Drouillard bringing in three bears — “One Old famel & her two Cubbs.” The rattlesnake count and the Drouillard bear, however, match Floyd’s June 6 entry almost exactly. Either Whitehouse has misdated the second paragraph, or he is conflating two days of activity. The Whitehouse-from-Ordway copying pattern visible elsewhere in the journals does not apply here; the bear and rattlesnake details come from a Floyd-adjacent source, suggesting Whitehouse drew on shared camp talk rather than Ordway’s terse notebook.
What the Composite Reveals
Read together, the five entries reconstruct a day that no single journal captures. Clark supplies the navigation, the salt-yield figure, and the astronomical observation. Gass alone preserves the boat incident. Floyd contributes the pictograph rock and credits the hunter. Whitehouse, despite his dating confusion, names the creeks and the bear family. Ordway offers the leanest record but corroborates the salt-making history.
The pattern of attention is also revealing. Clark’s prose remains disciplined and measurable even as he reports illness. Gass attends to risk and river mechanics. Floyd is drawn to the visible and named — pictures, hunters, place-names. The Saline Creek lick, with its 7-pounds-per-bushel concentration, would have registered to all of them as economically significant frontier intelligence; only Clark bothered to write the number down.
