The expedition’s progress on June 20, 1804, along the Missouri near present-day Boonville, Missouri, produced three journal entries that share a common geographic spine — Tiger Creek, Saukee Prairie, swift water, well-timbered banks — yet diverge sharply in what each narrator chose to preserve. Read together, the entries by William Clark, John Ordway, and Patrick Gass illustrate how the captain’s expansive observational register coexisted with the more compressed, route-focused notes of the enlisted men.
Shared Landmarks, Shared Sources
All three narrators record passing Tiger Creek and the prairie Ordway and Clark name “Sauke” or “Saukee.” Ordway notes it as
a large Beutiful prarie called Sauke prarie
while Clark writes of
a large butifull Prarie on the S. S. opposit a large Island, Calld Saukee Prarie
The phrasing is close enough — “large” and “beautiful/butifull” prairie, identical name — to suggest the sergeants were either drawing on shared evening conversation around the fire or, as scholars have long argued, that Ordway consulted Clark’s notes (or vice versa) when composing his own entries. Gass, by contrast, omits the prairie name altogether on the 20th, instead compressing two days into a single passage and folding the day’s observations into a general remark that “The land along here is good on both sides of the river.” His published 1807 narrative, edited by David McKeehan, frequently smooths and consolidates in this way, sacrificing local detail for readability.
Clark and Ordway both note the difficult current. Ordway plainly states, “we had verry hard water all this day,” while Clark records “Som verry Swift water to day.” Gass, writing his entry to cover the following day as well, supplies the mechanical detail the others omit: that the party “had to warp up our boat by a rope” for about a mile. Where Clark and Ordway describe the river, Gass describes the labor of moving against it — a difference of perspective consistent with his role among the working hands.
What Only Clark Records
The most striking divergence concerns an incident neither sergeant mentions. Clark writes:
I saw Pelicans to day on a Sand bar, my servant York nearly loseing an eye by a man throwing Sand into it
This is one of the few direct references in the June journals to York, the enslaved man Clark had brought on the expedition, and it is recorded in the same breath as a sighting of pelicans — placed grammatically between natural-history observation and the routine note of where the party encamped. The brevity is characteristic of Clark’s treatment of York throughout the journals: an event of clear violence (sand thrown into a man’s eye, nearly blinding him) is registered without expansion, without naming the man who threw it, and without consequence noted. Ordway and Gass pass over the incident in silence. Whether they were absent, considered it unworthy of record, or chose deliberately not to mention an act involving a member of the corps and the captain’s enslaved servant is unrecoverable from the written record alone.
Clark also alone records the celestial work of the day —
we took Some Loner observations, which detained us untill 1 oClock
— a reminder that lunar observations for longitude were the captains’ specialized burden. Ordway and Gass had no role in those calculations and accordingly do not mention the delay.
Register and Closure
Each narrator closes the day differently. Gass ends practically, with the encampment site. Ordway trails off with a list — “Saw Some Crabb Apple Trees on the bank &.C.” — the “&c.” suggesting more was seen than written. Clark closes with sensory texture:
a butifull night but the air exceedingly Damp, & the mosquiters verry troublesom
That juxtaposition of beauty and physical discomfort, recurrent throughout Clark’s 1804 entries, is largely absent from the sergeants’ more functional prose. June 20 is, in miniature, a demonstration of why the Lewis and Clark journals require multiple narrators to be read together: Gass supplies the labor, Ordway confirms the route, and Clark — for better and for worse — preserves what the others let pass.
