The Corps spent June 8, 1804 working upriver past the mouth of the Mine River (Missouri’s modern Lamine), encountering French traders descending with furs and camping at the lower point of Mills Island. Five narrators recorded the day, and the layered record reveals how differently each man processed the same hours on the water.
Clark’s Reconnaissance and a Buried Cache
Clark’s entry dwarfs the others, and not only in length. He left the boat with Sergeant Floyd to walk four miles below the Mine River, climbing what he measured as roughly 120 feet above high water and cataloguing the timber — oake, walnit Hickory ash
— along with berries on the thinning plains beyond. He relays French intelligence that Lead ore is found on this river in Several places
and traces the Mine’s headwaters between the Osage and Kansas drainages.
Most striking is a detail no other narrator records. At the Mills Island camp, Clark writes:
here I found Kegs an Pummey stone, and a place that fur or Skins had been burred by the hunters
This small archaeological observation — a hunters’ cache, abandoned kegs, pumice — is the kind of evidence that vanishes from the record entirely if Clark alone does not write it down. Ordway, Gass, Floyd, and Whitehouse all camped at the same island; none mention it.
The Traders: Two Canoes, Three Canoes, Four Canoes
The French fur party encountered that day exposes how unreliable headcount details become across narrators. Gass reports four canoes loaded with fur and peltry
. Ordway and Clark agree on 3 men on a Caussee
in two canoes from the R. des Sioux above the Maha (Omaha) Nation. Floyd splits the difference: 2 Canoes Lasht to Gather Loaded with Bever Skins otter Skins
, and adds the economic detail no one else captures — thay ar 30 day coming from that place
. Whitehouse, working through his second-hand scribe, garbles the geography into the Zoue [Sioux] River neer the Mandens
, conflating two distant regions.
The pattern is familiar: Clark and Ordway align closely on factual specifics (three men, two canoes, R. des Sioux, above the Maha), suggesting either shared note-taking habits or Ordway’s documented practice of consulting the captains’ field measurements. Gass rounds and simplifies. Floyd, writing his last entries before his death that August, adds the human-interest figure of thirty days’ travel time.
Whitehouse’s Scribe and the Mine River’s Width
The Whitehouse manuscript carries an editorial note worth flagging: at this point in the journal a second hand takes over for twenty-nine pages, and the writing — the Amens [Mine] River
— shows the scribe working from dictation or unfamiliar source material. Whitehouse’s entry also bleeds into June 9, recording Roe 15 miles
and a storm that prevented the pirogue from crossing for the hunters. The conflation of two days under a single heading is itself diagnostic of the second scribe’s looser dating.
The Mine River’s width drifts across narrators in a way that illustrates how field measurements were revised. Gass and Floyd both record 150 yards. Clark’s first-draft field notes give 90 yards; his fair-copy entry revises this down to about 70 yards wide at its mouth
. The discrepancy between Clark’s own two versions — and between Clark’s careful figure and the enlisted men’s rounder estimate — suggests Gass and Floyd may have been repeating an early conversational figure that Clark later corrected after observation.
What the Composite Adds
Read alone, any single entry for June 8 would yield a thin day: passed a river, met some traders, killed five deer, camped on an island. Read together, the entries reconstruct a fuller scene — Clark and Floyd walking inland while Lewis scouted the upper point, Drouillard delivering five deer that the white pirogue struggled to ferry across in heavy current, French traders descending after a month on the water, and at the campsite, the silent evidence of earlier hunters who had buried their skins and walked away.
