June 19, 1804 finds the Corps working upriver past Tabbo Creek in present-day Saline County, Missouri, fighting current swift enough to require hauling the keelboat by rope around a point of rocks. Five narrators preserve the day, and their entries diverge in revealing ways — Clark catalogues landscape and resources, Ordway notes a small but significant logistical detail, and Whitehouse appears to have telescoped two days into one.
The Same Creek, Five Measurements
Tabbo Creek anchors nearly every account, but its dimensions shift between narrators. Clark records it as
“a Creek on the L. Side Called Tabboe 15 yds. wide.”
Floyd, writing the same day, gives it as
“about 40 yards wide and Clear water beLow High Hills.”
Whitehouse calls it “the River Taboe” and pegs the mouth at “50 Y[ar]ds.” Three observers, three widths — a useful reminder that even basic measurements in the journals reflect estimation rather than survey.
The hard-water passage receives similar treatment from multiple hands. Clark describes being
“obliged to take out the roape & Draw up the Boat for 1/2 a mile,”
while Ordway records
“a bad place of Rocks, the water so Swift that we were obledged to hole the Boat by a Rope.”
The two sergeants and the captain corroborate each other on the labor of the day; Floyd compresses it to two words, “Strong water.”
What Only Clark Sees
Clark alone preserves the lake on the south side — a feature that becomes the day’s richest ecological note. He describes it as
“a Lake of the Sircumfrance of Several miles… this Lake is Said to abound in all kinds of fowls, great quanties of Deer frequent this Lake dureing Summer Season, and feed on the hows &c. &c. they find on the edgers.”
Gass mentions the lake’s existence (“a small lake about two miles distant”) but without Clark’s account of waterfowl, deer, and forage. The pattern recurs throughout the journals: Gass registers the geographic fact, Clark layers the natural history onto it.
Clark also names features the others skip entirely — “Tiger River,” the “Isle Of Panters” — and offers a brief soil assessment of both banks, judging the north side “rich and Sufficiently high to afford Settlements.” The settlement-suitability remark is characteristic Clark: he reads the country with a surveyor’s and a speculator’s eye simultaneously.
Ordway’s Mosquito Bars and Whitehouse’s Drift
Ordway contributes the day’s most quietly important detail. After noting the mosquitoes are “verry troublesome,” he adds:
“Got Musquetoes bears from Cap.t Lewis to sleep in.”
This is among the earliest references to the mosquito bars (netting) being issued from Lewis’s stores — a small logistical moment that no other narrator records, and one that will matter increasingly as the expedition pushes into summer along the lower Missouri.
Whitehouse’s entry, by contrast, presents a textual problem. His June 19 note is brief, and his account of hunters killing a bear, the French pirogue’s crew jumping out to push, and camping at “Strong water point” appears under a June 20 heading that has bled into the June 19 transcription. Floyd’s parallel June 19 and June 20 entries — both noting “ouer Hunters Did not Return Last night” — suggest the bear-and-pirogue episode belongs to the following day. Whitehouse’s tendency to track Ordway’s content closely is well documented; here he seems to have either anticipated or conflated entries, a reminder that his journal cannot always be read as an independent witness.
A Note on the Editorial Apparatus
The Ordway transcription preserves editorial footnotes referencing Drewyer’s tale of a snake that “made Goubeling noises like a turkey” — a story Clark tells elsewhere but which does not appear in his June 19 entry as transcribed here. The footnotes also flag Whitehouse’s phrase “little Zoe [Sioux] prarie” and Floyd’s correction of the party of Frenchmen encountered earlier. These cross-references underscore how thoroughly the narrators’ entries must be read against one another: no single journal, on June 19, captures the full record of even an ordinary day on the Missouri.
