The reunion with George Shannon, the youngest member of the Corps of Discovery, dominates all four journal entries for September 11, 1804. Yet each narrator filters the event through his own concerns and rhetorical habits, producing a useful case study in how the expedition’s parallel record-keeping both converges and diverges.
The Shannon Episode: Convergence and Divergence
All four narrators agree on the central facts: Shannon had been absent sixteen days, had exhausted his bullets, had subsisted roughly twelve days on grapes, and had abandoned one of two horses. Gass renders this in his characteristically compressed prose:
This man had been absent 16 days, and his bullets being expended, he subsisted 12 days almost wholly on grapes… We now had only one horse left.
Whitehouse’s account tracks Gass closely in both phrasing and selection of detail — the sixteen days, the twelve days of grapes, the single remaining horse — suggesting either shared conversation around the camp or Whitehouse’s known habit of consulting other journals. Whitehouse adds the specific timing that the lost horse was abandoned “7 days ago,” a detail absent in Gass.
Ordway, by contrast, devotes the most space to Shannon and supplies the richest psychological texture. He alone records Shannon’s reasoning — that Shannon had seen tracks he mistook for the main party and pushed ahead, then despaired and turned back “in hopes to meet some other Boat.” Ordway also preserves the striking improvisation:
he Shot a rabit with Sticks which he cut & put in his gun after his Balls were gone.
Clark independently confirms this rabbit-and-stick detail in his second entry — “one Rabit, which he Killed by shooting a piece of hard Stick in place of a ball” — but Gass and Whitehouse omit it entirely. The convergence between Clark and Ordway here, against the Gass-Whitehouse pair, is a recurring pattern in the expedition record: the sergeant’s journal and the captain’s field notes often share specifics that the enlisted men’s accounts compress or miss.
Clark’s Moral Frame
Clark alone supplies the episode’s most quoted line, an editorial reflection that elevates the incident from logistical mishap to parable:
thus a man had like to have Starved to death in a land of Plenty for the want of Bulletes or Something to kill his meat
Clark also notes the irony Ordway hints at — that buffalo approached within thirty yards of Shannon’s camp while he starved. Where Ordway reports the fact, Clark moralizes it. Clark further records that Shannon was “keeping one horse for the last resorse,” implying he had resolved to eat the animal if no rescue came; Ordway puts this more bluntly: “he was near killing the horse to Satisfy hunger.”
A small chronological discrepancy is worth noting. Clark’s second entry states Shannon had been gone “22 days,” while his first entry and the other three narrators give sixteen. The figure of twenty-two more accurately reflects Shannon’s departure on August 26, suggesting Clark corrected himself on revision while the sixteen-day figure circulated among the men as the version Shannon himself reported.
What Each Narrator Notices Beyond Shannon
The day’s other events further distinguish the four registers. Clark devotes extensive attention to a prairie-dog village on the larboard side — “800 yards wide & 970 yds. long” — killing four specimens “with a view to have their Skins Stufed.” Ordway mentions the “village of little Dogs” only in passing. Gass and Whitehouse omit it altogether, despite its scientific interest. This is consistent with Clark’s role as the expedition’s principal naturalist-observer at this stage.
Ordway alone narrates a sustained personal adventure: stalking sixteen bull buffalo in the rain, his red shirt drawing one animal’s curiosity, his shot to the head failing because the buffalo’s “long hair” absorbed the ball, and his rifle fouling in the wet. The episode reveals Ordway’s taste for first-person narrative scene-building, a quality that distinguishes his journal from Gass’s terser military-report style.
Gass and Whitehouse, the two enlisted-men diarists, produce the most condensed entries and show the closest verbal kinship. Both foreground the weather (“it began to rain” / “Rained verry hard”), the hunting tally, and the bare facts of Shannon’s return. Their accounts function as the expedition’s baseline record; Ordway and Clark supply the texture and reflection that make September 11 memorable in the larger expedition narrative.
