The journals of August 4, 1806, offer a striking case study in how four men sharing the same river on the same day can produce four entirely different documents. Patrick Gass, John Ordway, William Clark, and Meriwether Lewis were all descending the Missouri toward the planned reunion of the expedition’s two parties, yet their entries diverge so sharply in subject, register, and detail that a reader unfamiliar with the geography might struggle to recognize them as accounts of a shared experience.
The Sawyer Incident: Ordway’s First-Person Terror, Lewis’s Reconstruction
The day’s most dramatic event — Alexander Willard’s near-drowning among submerged trees (“sawyers”) in a dark bend of the Missouri — survives in only two of the four journals. Ordway, who lived through it, writes in breathless, comma-spliced urgency:
about 11 oClock at night we found ourselves in a thick place of Sawyers as the corrent drawed us in and we had no chance to git out of them So we run about half way through and the Stern run under a limb of a tree and caught willard who was in the Stern and drew him out as the current was verry rapid, he held by the limb I being in the bow of the canoe took my oar and hailed the bow first one way and the other So as to clear the Sawyers
Ordway’s prose mirrors the chaos: clauses pile on without pause, perspective shifts between the two men, and the river’s roar interrupts communication (“he could not hear me as the water roared past the Sawyers”). Willard’s improvised raft of two sticks tied together with his clothes is the kind of detail only a participant would record.
Lewis, receiving the story secondhand after Ordway and Willard rejoined the main party near midnight, restructures it into orderly narrative sequence. He supplies measurements absent from Ordway’s telling — Ordway “drifted down about half a mile,” Willard was “taken up about a mile below” — and frames the episode with a captain’s assessment:
it was fortunate for Willard that he could swim tolerably well.
Where Ordway records the experience, Lewis records the report. The register difference is instructive: Ordway’s spelling (“corrent,” “verry,” “git”) and Lewis’s polished syntax reflect not only education but also temporal distance from the event.
What Gass and Clark Leave Out
Gass’s entry is the day’s shortest and flattest. He notes the missing hunters, the game killed, and the passing of Milk River, closing with a bare mileage figure: “Having proceeded 88 miles we encamped for the night.” The sawyer incident is absent — unsurprising, since Gass was traveling with Lewis’s main party, but his terseness even on shared events (the Milk River crossing, which Lewis describes with hydrological care) suggests Gass was already compressing for the published narrative his journal would become.
Clark, descending the Yellowstone with a separate detachment, was not present for the sawyer episode at all. His entry is dominated by a single antagonist:
Musquetors excessively troublesom So much So that the men complained that they could not work at their Skins for those troublesom insects. and I find it entirely impossible to hunt in the bottoms
Clark notes that Sacagawea’s child — “The Child of Shabono” — has a face “much puffed up & Swelled” from bites, a domestic detail no other narrator on this date approaches. His decision to break camp and move downriver is driven entirely by insects and the difficulty of drying elk meat, and he leaves a note pinned to a pole for Lewis at the abandoned site. This logistical thread runs parallel to, but does not intersect with, the events on Lewis’s stretch of river.
Cross-Narrator Patterns
Three observations emerge. First, Lewis appears to have drawn directly on Ordway’s account for the sawyer narrative — the sequence of events, the detail of Willard’s stick-raft, and the half-mile and one-mile distances align too closely for independent composition, though Lewis adds editorial framing. Second, Gass, often suspected of relying on Ordway for his published 1807 narrative, here records none of the night’s drama, suggesting either that he wrote before Ordway returned or that he deliberately omitted incidents involving only detached parties. Third, Clark’s mosquito-dominated entry illustrates how physically separated the two captains were on this date: the same calendar day produces a near-drowning in one journal and a swollen toddler’s face in another.
The rattlesnake killed by Lewis’s party — five feet long, with “176 scuta on the abdomen and 25 on the tail” — appears in Lewis with naturalist precision, in Ordway as a passing mention, and not at all in Gass or Clark. It is a small reminder that even on quiet stretches of river, what each narrator chose to count, measure, or ignore tells us as much about the writer as about the day.
