The fifth of June, 1804, produced one of the expedition’s earliest information exchanges with traders coming downstream — and the cross-narrator record reveals how differently each journalist weighted the encounter. Five narrators wrote that day, but only Clark, Ordway, and Floyd treat the meeting with the two Frenchmen as the day’s substance. Gass compresses the event to a single clause; Whitehouse abandons the day in two sentences.
The Frenchmen and the Burned Plains
At eleven o’clock the party hailed two canoes lashed together, descending laden with peltry. Ordway gives the bare frame: the men had come from 80 Leagues up the Kansias River, where they wintered
. Floyd echoes Ordway’s phrasing nearly verbatim — they Came from 80 Leages up the Kensier [Kansas] River whare they wintered
— a parallel suggesting either shared note-taking at camp or copying after the fact, a pattern that recurs throughout the early journals.
Clark alone preserves what the Frenchmen actually said. He records that they had caught a great qty of Beever but unfortunatey lost it by the burning of the plains
, and that the Kansas Nation hunted on the Missourie last Winter and are now persueing the Buffalow in the Plains
. This is the first concrete intelligence in the journals about prairie fires destroying a winter’s catch and about the seasonal movements of the Kansas — information Ordway and Floyd either did not hear or did not think worth transcribing. Clark’s second draft of the entry expands the detail further, specifying that the loss came by fire from the Praries
. The captain was the interviewer; the sergeants were stenographers of the meeting itself, not its content.
The Manitou Rock and the Geography of Naming
The day’s other landmark — a painted cliff on the south bank — receives strikingly different treatment. Ordway describes a high Clifts of Rocks on which was Painted the Pickture of the Devil
. Gass independently logs the same feature among a string of named tributaries (Lead Creek, Little Goodwoman, Big Rock Creek). Clark, characteristically, names it: a Projecting Rock called the Manitou a Painting from this Deavel
, recording both the Indigenous name and the French traders’ gloss in a single clipped phrase. Floyd omits the rock entirely. The pictograph itself — almost certainly an Indigenous painting interpreted through European demonology — passes into the record only because Ordway and Clark each thought it worth a line.
Clark’s Private Day
Clark’s entry alone preserves the day’s domestic texture. He notes he is verry unwell with a Slight feever from a bad cold caught three days ago at the Grand
. He records York swimming to an island to gather greens and swimming back with them — one of the small, vivid moments involving the enslaved man that surface only in Clark’s hand. He notes the boat draws 4 foot water
and could not cross the quicksand, and that a favorable wind was wasted because our mast being broke by accidence
— a detail Floyd confirms obliquely the following morning when he writes that they set out late after ouer mast mended
. Clark closes with the day’s most ominous notation: the hunter or spy discovered the sign of a war party of abt. 10 Men
. None of the other four journalists mentions this.
Whitehouse’s entry — a fair morning. we Set out eairly and proceeded on passed a creek on the South Side and Camped on the Same Side
— is so attenuated it suggests either illness, exhaustion, or a day on which he simply deferred to Ordway, whose entry he frequently mirrors. Gass, writing retrospectively in published form, telescopes June 5th, 6th, and 7th into a single paragraph, which flattens the Frenchmen encounter into the bland phrase We met two Frenchmen in two canoes laden with peltry
.
The composite record demonstrates a structural feature of the early journals: when something genuinely informative happened, Clark captured the substance while the enlisted journalists captured the event. The burned beaver catch, the Kansas hunting on the Missouri, the broken mast, York’s greens, the war-party sign — each survives in only one hand. Reading any single journal for June 5, 1804, would yield a different river entirely.
