The entries of Patrick Gass, John Ordway, and William Clark for August 19, 1806 share a common armature: a violent wind that pinned the descending party to a sandbar somewhere below the Mandan villages, hunters dispatched into the bottoms, a late-afternoon lull, and a short evening run downriver. Yet the three accounts diverge sharply in register, in detail, and in what each narrator considers worth preserving — divergences that illuminate how the expedition’s documentary record was assembled by men with very different vantage points and rhetorical habits.
A Shared Skeleton, Three Tallies
All three writers anchor the day to the same pivot: the wind dropped near 4 P.M. and the party moved. Ordway compresses the entire episode into a single breath:
high wind so it detained us the hunters went out & killed 5 Elk [and] 10 deer about 4 P. M. the wind fell a little and we procd on took on board the best of the meat which was below and Campd at dark
Gass, writing for an eventual reading public, smooths the same material into fuller sentences and offers a slightly different game count — “six elk and eleven deer” — taken on board before the party “encamped on a sand-beach.” Clark, the commanding officer, records “4 Elk & 12 deer.” The three tallies (5/10, 6/11, 4/12) are close enough to confirm a shared event and divergent enough to show that no narrator is simply copying another on this date. Each man counted, or asked, for himself.
The arithmetic of meat is the kind of detail where Ordway and Gass typically converge against Clark, since the sergeants stood closer to the butchering. On August 19 the pattern does not hold cleanly: Gass’s numbers sit between Ordway’s and Clark’s, suggesting Gass may have revised his draft after comparing notes, or simply tallied a later addition to the pile.
What Only Clark Saw Fit to Record
The most striking divergence is not numerical but human. Clark alone preserves the discomfort of the camp itself — “as our camp was on a Sand bar we were very much distressd with the blows of Sand” — and alone reports on Lewis’s recovery from the hunting accident of August 11:
Capt. Lewis’es wounds are heeling very fast, I am much in hope of his being able to walk in 8 or 10 days
Gass offers the parallel reassurance — “Captain Lewis is getting much better and we are all in good spirits” — but he places it in his August 19 entry as published, where Clark’s manuscript locates the wind-bound day. (Gass’s printed journal, edited by David McKeehan, frequently consolidates and reorders adjacent days; readers should not assume the printed dates align perfectly with the manuscript chronology.) Ordway says nothing of Lewis at all.
Clark’s entry is also the only one to register the presence of the Charbonneau and Jessaume households, who were traveling with the descending party after the leave-taking at the Mandan villages:
Jessomme the Interpreter let me have a piece of a lodge and the Squars pitched or Stretched it over Some Sticks, under this piece of leather I Slept dry, it is the only covering which I have had Suffecient to keep off the rain Since I left the Columbia.
This is a remarkable admission from a captain who had crossed the continent and back: that the first reliable shelter from rain in months came not from expedition stores but from a borrowed Mandan lodge-cover, pitched by Indigenous women whose labor Clark records without naming. Neither Gass nor Ordway mentions the lodge, the rain at night, or the women. The detail survives only because Clark wrote it down.
Register and Audience
The three entries also illustrate the register differences that shape the expedition’s textual record. Ordway’s prose is telegraphic, present-tense, oriented to logistics: wind, hunt, meat, camp. Gass — or rather the Gass-McKeehan published text — speaks to a civilian readership, supplying generalizations (“we go on very safe and can make fifty or sixty miles a day”) that Ordway and Clark would never bother to write because they are obvious to anyone in the boats. Clark writes as commander and as private observer at once: he gives orders to the hunters, assesses Lewis’s prognosis, notes the running of the elk and the leanness of the buffalo bulls, and confides his gratitude for a dry night.
Read together, the three entries for August 19, 1806 show the expedition’s documentary practice in microcosm: overlapping witnesses producing overlapping but never identical records, with the richest ethnographic and personal material reserved — as so often on the homeward voyage — for Clark’s pen.
