The entries for September 23, 1804 capture the Corps of Discovery on the Missouri near the Big Bend, one day before their fraught council with the Teton Sioux. Read side by side, the four surviving accounts—by William Clark, Patrick Gass, John Ordway, and Joseph Whitehouse—reveal not only what the men saw but how information traveled through the expedition’s hierarchy of journal-keepers.
A Shared Template Among the Sergeants and Privates
The entries by Gass, Ordway, and Whitehouse follow nearly identical sequences: timber on the north side, high or barren hills on the south, Smoke Creek, Elk Island at the lower end of the long reach, and the evening encounter with four Indians on the sand beach. The phrasing in places is so close that copying among journals is unmistakable. Whitehouse writes:
passed Some timber on the N. S. high land on the S. S. passed a creek on the N. S. called Smoak creek. R. Fields went out to hunt we passed Elk Island at the lower end of the long reach.
Ordway’s version of the same passage tracks the order of observations exactly, though with marginally fuller detail—he adds that the bottom was “covered with Timber and Grapes” and that the wind was “favourable from S.E.” Gass, the most compressed of the three, omits Reuben Fields’s hunting departure but retains the same skeleton. The pattern suggests Ordway’s journal—or a now-lost shared field notebook—served as the template, with Whitehouse and Gass producing tighter paraphrases.
One small detail distinguishes the enlisted men’s accounts: Ordway alone notes that “Capt Clark returned had Spied a large fire in the praries a fiew miles back on S. Side.” Whitehouse and Gass do not mention the prairie fire at all, though Clark’s own entry treats it as a central event of the day.
Clark’s Command-Level Awareness
Clark’s journal operates on a different register entirely. Where the others record four Indians and a brief swim across the river, Clark identifies them as “three Soues boys” and extracts strategic intelligence:
those boys informed us that a Band of Sieux called the Tetons of 80 Lodges wer Camped near the mouth of the next River, and 60 Lodges more a Short distance above them, they had that day Set the praries on fire to let those Camps Know of our approach
This is the kind of detail an enlisted journalist either did not learn or did not think to record. Clark connects the smoke seen earlier in the day—”we observed a great Smoke to the SW. which is an Indian Signal of their haveing discovered us”—to the boys’ arrival in the evening, framing the entire day as a single diplomatic narrative. He also records his diplomatic response: “we gave those boys two twists of Tobacco to carry to their Chiefs & Warriors to Smoke, with derections to tell them that we wished to Speak to them tomorrow.”
Ordway captures a fragment of this exchange (“the Capts Gave them Some Tobacco”) but reverses the geography, writing that the men “Set them across” back to the south side. Gass and Whitehouse echo the same return-crossing detail. Clark says nothing about sending them back, suggesting either that the enlisted men witnessed a moment Clark omitted or that they misunderstood the diplomatic gesture as a simple ferry service.
Toponymy and Naming
Naming practice diverges sharply between the captain and the ranks. The enlisted journals all call the day’s first creek “Smoke Creek” or “Smoak creek.” Clark, writing more deliberately, names a second creek “Reubens Cr.” because, as he explains, “R. Fields was the first who found it.” None of the other three journalists records this naming, though all three note Fields’s hunting excursion and his return with an antelope (a “Goat” or “Cabbra”). The act of bestowing a name appears to have been a captain’s prerogative, and the enlisted men either did not hear of it or did not consider it worth preserving.
Clark also identifies the small island in the southern bend as “goat Island,” a name absent from the other three journals. His ornithological note—”I saw this morning 12 of those Black & white birds of the corvus Species,” likely magpies—has no counterpart in Gass, Ordway, or Whitehouse, reinforcing the impression that natural-history observation was largely Clark’s (and Lewis’s) domain on this date.
Taken together, the four entries for September 23, 1804 demonstrate the layered structure of expedition record-keeping: a shared enlisted account moving in lockstep, and a command journal carrying the diplomatic and scientific weight of the day.
