The 21st of June 1804 found the Corps grinding upstream past a swift, sand-roiled stretch near the mouth of what Clark renders as Eue-bert Creek (Floyd’s Deubau, Ordway’s peulaw or Eue bow). Five narrators committed the day to paper, and the resulting record is unusually layered: Clark provides two distinct passes at the entry, Ordway turns lyrical over the timber, Floyd compresses the geography into a clerk’s inventory, Gass abbreviates almost to nothing, and Whitehouse — characteristically — appears to be working from someone else’s notes.
The Same Creek, Five Spellings
The creek mouth opposite the islands is the day’s anchor point, and the orthographic chaos around it is instructive. Clark settles on
Eue-bert Creek & River
and observes that its upper branch
head against the Mine River & is large
. Ordway hears it as
peulaw or Eue bow Creek
. Floyd writes
Deubau [Du Beau, or Eau Beau] Creeks
, treating it as a pair. Gass abandons the French entirely and gives only the English calque:
a large creek, called the Fire-prairie, and which is 60 yards wide.
Whitehouse skips the name and substitutes a generic landmark,
the Strong water Point
. The five spellings preserve, in miniature, how an oral French-Creole place name fractured as it passed through five Anglophone ears with five levels of literacy.
Clark’s Double Entry and the Broken Window
Clark’s two versions of the day are the richest source for what actually happened at the swift water. Bowman Pierre Cruzatte — whom Clark identifies as
a half Mahar Indian
— was sent ahead to scout a channel. The water on both sides
rored like an immence falls
, and the party chose the north (right) side, ascending by cordelle and anchor. The cost was small but vivid:
Bracking a Cabbin window & loseing Some oars which were Swong under the windows
. Only Clark records this damage. Floyd, who notes the strong water and the islands with surveyor-like care, omits the incident entirely. Gass omits the difficulty altogether and reports only that a man killed a bear. Whitehouse captures the labor —
had to towe the Cheif part of the day
— but not the breakage.
Clark’s second pass also yields one of the more striking aesthetic notes in the early journals: at sunset,
Blue & white Streeks Centering at the Sun as She disappeared and the Clouds Situated to the S. W, Guilded in the most butifull manner.
No other narrator looks up.
What Each Man Was Watching
The hunting tally exposes the day’s documentary slippage. Clark’s first draft credits the hunters with a deer; his second upgrades it to
a Buck & a pore Turkey
. Ordway, who was himself ashore with Drouillard, claims the deer and the turkey for that party and adds his own appraisal of the country:
I never Saw as fine Timbered land in my life nor Such Rich handsome bottom land
. Floyd reports
one Deer
. Gass reports a bear. Whitehouse splits the difference and reports
One deer & one turky and a bear Skin
— the bear reduced to a hide, suggesting he is reconciling secondhand reports rather than witnessing the catch.
Whitehouse’s entry is also short and telegraphic in a way that diverges from his usual Ordway-derived pattern: the phrasing here doesn’t track Ordway’s. The bear, however, tracks Gass. It is a small reminder that the copying networks among the sergeants and privates were not unidirectional.
The Land Classification
Clark alone uses the day to formalize a three-tier taxonomy of riverine land — overflow bottom of cottonwood and willow; second bottom of
Cotton, Walnut, Som ash, Hack berry, Mulberry, Lynn & Sycamore
; and high lands rising 80 to 100 feet, timbered with oak and blue ash. Ordway gives the same country in a sentence of admiration; Floyd reduces it to
the timber is Cotton wood
; Gass and Whitehouse omit it. The contrast is the clearest illustration in the day’s record of how Clark was already drafting the territorial report while the others were keeping a log.
