A Boat Nearly Overset
The central event of June 14, 1804 is a near-capsizing on a treacherous sand bar opposite an island on the lower Missouri. Clark devotes the most ink to it, describing the river’s mechanics with an engineer’s eye:
a Sand bar makeing out 2/3 Cross the river Sand Collecting &c forming Bars and Bars washg a way, the boat Struck and turned, She was near oversetting we saved her by Some extrodany exertions of our party (ever ready to inconture any fatigue for the premotion of the enterpris)
Clark’s second entry for the day intensifies the danger, calling it
one of the worst quick or moveing Sand bars which I have Seen
and crediting
the active exertions of the men
with preventing the boat from turning over. Whitehouse independently confirms the severity:
the boat with the Other Crafts took the Sand bar with much dificuelty Got them of[f] Got on through many Deficueltys.
Ordway, by contrast, mentions only “verry hard water” — a striking omission given that Whitehouse-from-Ordway copying is a documented pattern elsewhere in the journals. On this date Whitehouse’s account of the sand bar is closer to Clark’s than to Ordway’s, suggesting either Whitehouse witnessed the struggle directly from the keelboat or drew on Clark’s draft. Gass compresses the entire ordeal to a single phrase: “difficult to ascend.”
The French Traders from the Pawnee
All five narrators record meeting a party of returning French traders, but the details fracture revealingly. Gass simply notes “some Frenchmen from the Poenese or Ponis nation.” Ordway specifies
2 canoes loaded with peltry, four Frenchman bound to S* Charles, came from the Pannee nation, where they had been hunting for 2 years
with precise arrival and departure times (11 a.m. to 3 p.m.). Floyd alone records the racial composition of the party:
3 French men and one Negro [Mallatto] from the Poncye Nations. they have ben up 3 years with the Indianes 2 of them is half preades of the poncas.
Floyd extends the residency to three years and identifies two of the men as half-Ponca — ethnographic detail no other narrator preserves. Clark explains what the captains were doing during the four-hour stop:
we detained 2 hours with a view of engageing one of the hands to go to the Pania nation with a View to get those people to meet us on the river.
The discrepancy between “Pania” (Pawnee) and “Poncye” (Ponca) — two distinct nations — runs unresolved through the entries, with Floyd alone choosing Ponca and the others Pawnee.
Snake Creek and Drouillard’s Gobbling Serpent
The day’s place-naming clusters around snakes: Snake Bluff, Snake Creek, the “place of Snakes.” Floyd offers the fullest etymology:
a noted place whare Indianes of Differnt nations Cross to Go to ware they Say that thar is hundreds of Snakes at this place
— a crossing point with both military and herpetological significance. Clark’s two drafts treat the name more matter-of-factly, deriving it from “the number of Snakes about this place.” Only Clark records what may be the day’s strangest entry — Drouillard’s report of
a remarkable Snake inhabiting a Small lake 5 ms. below which gobbles like a Turkey & may be herd Several miles
Clark’s second draft adds that Drouillard fired his gun and “the noise was increased,” and that an unnamed Frenchman corroborated the account. Whether Drouillard heard a bittern, a frog chorus, or invented the story for camp amusement, Clark records it without skepticism, noting only that “he has heard the indians Mention This Species of Snake.” That neither Ordway, Gass, Whitehouse, nor Floyd repeats the gobbling-snake story suggests Drouillard told it privately to the captains rather than around a general fire.
What Each Narrator Adds
The day demonstrates the value of redundant journaling. Without Clark, the boat’s near-capsizing reads as routine difficulty. Without Floyd, the racial and tribal composition of the trader party is lost. Without Ordway, the precise duration of the encounter disappears. Without Whitehouse, independent confirmation of the sand-bar crisis from a non-officer’s vantage is missing. Gass, characteristically terse, contributes mainly negative evidence — what a working soldier considered worth noting (the Frenchmen, the creek) versus what he left to others (the snake legend, the diplomatic mission, the racial detail).
