One Accident, Five Angles
The broken mast dominates every entry for June 4, 1804, but each narrator assigns blame and detail differently. Gass states flatly that the mast broke “by steering too close to the shore.” Ordway, the steersman himself, offers the only first-person admission:
mast broke by my Stearing the Boat near the Shore the Rope or Stay to her mast got fast in a limb of a Secamore tree & it broke verry Easy.
Floyd, more diplomatic, attributes the mishap to “ouer Stersman” without naming Ordway. Clark, in his field notes, writes only that the mast broke “by the boat running under a tree”; in his expanded entry he is more pointed — “here the Sergt. at the helm run under a bending Tree & broke the mast” — confirming Ordway’s identification while preserving a touch of command-rank distance. The sycamore that Ordway names appears nowhere else.
The party commemorated the accident by naming the nearest stream Mast Creek, a fact recorded by Ordway, Floyd, and Clark but not by Gass or Whitehouse.
The Nightingale That Wasn’t
A bird sang through the previous night, and three narrators independently mark it. Ordway and Clark both christen the stream Nightingale Creek; Clark adds that the bird “is the first of the kind I ever herd.” Ordway echoes nearly the same phrasing — “the first we heard below on the River” — one of the day’s clearer signals of the documented Ordway-Clark proximity in language. Whitehouse, who often borrows from Ordway, here does not: his entry is unusually terse, noting only that the party “branded Several trees” in the morning and made roughly four miles. Floyd ignores the bird entirely. Gass omits it as well, preferring to close his entry on the seven deer brought in by the hunters.
The hunters’ tally itself shows the kind of small discrepancy that recurs across the journals: Gass and Clark report seven deer; Ordway and Floyd report eight. The kill was jerked that evening, a detail only Ordway preserves.
Clark Alone on the Hill
The richest passage of the day belongs to Clark, and to Clark alone. While Lewis camped below, Clark climbed roughly 170 feet up a bluff on the south side to investigate a French report of lead ore. He found no mineral but described a curious mound roughly six feet high atop about 100 acres where “the large timber is Dead,” and a projecting limestone shelf concealing a cave above the river.
one of the party says he has found Lead ore a verry extensive Cave under this hill next the river, the Land on the top is fine, This is a very bad part of the river
Gass and Ordway both register the lead mines as the night’s campsite landmark, but neither ascended the hill. Floyd notes the “high Cliftes” under which the party encamped without remarking on what lay above them. Clark’s solo reconnaissance — including his passage through nettles “as high as my brest” — is preserved nowhere else in the cross-narrator record.
What Each Narrator Kept
The day illustrates the division of observational labor that would persist across the journey. Clark supplies courses, distances, and the only topographic and antiquarian detail (the mound, the cave, the dead timber). Ordway preserves mechanical cause (the sycamore limb, the stay) and ethnographic detail (the jerking of meat). Floyd records place-names with phonetic spellings — “Zon Cer,” “Batue De charr” — that diverge from Clark’s “Zoncar” and “Batue a De charm,” useful for tracking how the party heard French toponyms before standardizing them. Gass compresses the day into three sentences. Whitehouse, atypically brief, contributes only the morning’s tree-branding, an act no one else mentions and which likely marked the campsite of the previous night. Lewis, as throughout this stretch of the outbound voyage, is silent.
