The expedition’s downstream journey on September 2, 1806 produced three journal entries describing a single sequence of events: an early start, a passage by the mouth of the River Jacque (James), a buffalo hunt forced by depleted meat stores, a wind that pinned the canoes ashore, and an evening retreat to a sand bar where the breeze offered relief from mosquitoes. Reading Patrick Gass, John Ordway, and William Clark side by side reveals how thoroughly the enlisted journalists’ accounts converge on the day’s hard facts — and how distinctly Clark’s captain’s-eye observations stand apart.
A Shared Skeleton of Events
Gass and Ordway produce strikingly parallel entries, a pattern visible across much of the return voyage. Both note the early departure, the high head wind, the two buffalo killed by hunters, the troublesome mosquitoes, and the move to a sand bar for the night. Gass writes that the party
went on about two miles, when the wind blew so violent that we had to encamp for the night, on a large sand bar, where the musquitoes are not so bad, as where there are woods or bushes.
Ordway echoes the same logic almost beat for beat:
The Musquetoes so troublesome that we mooved down a short distance and Camped on a sand beach for the night.
The two sergeants share not only content but reasoning — the sand bar is chosen specifically as a refuge from insects harbored in timber. Ordway adds two details Gass omits: the party passed "the mouth of River Jaque," gathered "Some good pipe clay," and the hunters brought in "2 Turkeys" in addition to the buffalo. Gass, by contrast, gives the buffalo a more appreciative gloss — "two fine fat buffaloe cows" — and dwells on the "best of the meat" carried back to the canoes.
Clark’s Wider Field of Vision
Clark’s entry is roughly four times the length of either sergeant’s and operates in a different register. Where Gass and Ordway record what happened, Clark records what it meant and what surrounded it. He alone identifies the ruined structure on the northeast bank as a likely trace of recent Euro-American commerce:
in the first bottom below on the N E. Side I observed the remains of a house which had been built since we passed up, this most probably was McClellins tradeing house with the Yanktons in the Winter of 1804 & 5
Neither Gass nor Ordway mentions the structure. Clark also takes personal command of the buffalo hunt — "I took with me 8 men and prosued a Small Gang of Cows in the plains 3 miles" — supplying the operational detail that the sergeants compress into the passive observation that hunters killed two animals. His botanical notes ("Lynn and Slipery Elm… white Oak is very Common also white ash on the riveens and high bottoms") and his ornithological note about four prairie fowl "Common to the Illinois" being the highest specimens yet observed reflect the natural-history brief that the captains carried but the sergeants did not.
Clark also extends the mosquito reasoning that Gass and Ordway state more flatly, articulating the underlying mechanism:
on the Sand bars the wind which generaly blows moderately at night blows off those pests and we Sleep Soundly.
It is plausible that the sergeants’ shorter formulations derive from a shared camp understanding of which Clark preserves the fuller version, though direct copying between Gass and Ordway — frequent elsewhere in the journals — cannot be ruled out here given how closely their phrasing tracks.
A Detail Only Clark Records
One observation in Clark’s entry has no parallel in the others and is easily missed: the two turkeys Ordway notes in passing become, in Clark’s account, an ethnographic moment. The birds, Clark writes, were
of which the Indians very much admired being the first which they ever Saw.
The "Indians" here are the expedition’s traveling companions from the upper river, for whom the wild turkey of the lower Missouri woodlands was an unfamiliar species. Ordway lists the turkeys as game; Clark registers them as a marker of biogeographic transition perceived by Native eyes. He closes with a brief, telling note on Lewis — "Capt L. is mending fast" — a reminder, absent from both sergeants’ entries, that the co-commander was still convalescing from the gunshot wound received on August 11. The day’s twenty-two miles, won against a hard southeasterly, are recorded only by Clark.
