The events of May 24, 1804, near the Tavern Cave stretch of the Missouri produced one of the earliest documented near-catastrophes of the expedition. The keelboat, under tow against a powerful current, struck a sandbar, broke its rope, and pivoted three times before the crew managed to secure it. Four narrators recorded the day, and the comparison reveals striking differences in observational depth, narrative investment, and stylistic register.
A Spectrum of Attention
The most arresting feature of this date is the gulf between the fullest and the briefest accounts. Charles Floyd dispatches the entire day in a single line:
nothin Remarkble Nothing ocord this day encamped on South Side
For Floyd, a near-shipwreck warranted no mention at all. Patrick Gass is only marginally more forthcoming, condensing the event to a single sentence:
This day our boat turned in a ripple, and nearly upset.
Gass’s word “ripple” — minimizing what Clark calls “the worst I ever Saw” — suggests either retrospective composure or a sergeant’s reluctance to dramatize. John Ordway’s surviving fragment for the date is similarly clipped (“lected encamped on S Side”), with the bulk of the page given over to editorial footnotes about Bonhomme Creek and the Femme Osage. Among the enlisted journalists, only the captain produces a sustained narrative.
Clark’s Double Account
William Clark records the incident twice, and the doubling is itself instructive. His first pass focuses on geography and the mechanics of the accident:
we wer verry near loseing our Boat in Toeing She Struck the Sands the Violence of the Current was so great that the Toe roap Broke, the Boat turned Broadside, as the Current Washed the Sand from under her She wheeled & lodged on the bank below as often as three times, before we got her in Deep water, nothing Saved her but
The sentence breaks off mid-clause — a textual artifact suggesting Clark was writing in haste or returned later to expand. His second account is fuller, more reflective, and gives the place a name:
hard water this place being the worst I ever Saw, I call it the retregrade bend.
The act of naming — “retregrade bend” — converts a near-loss into a landmark, a habit Clark exercises throughout the journals. He also supplies a courier-relay detail absent from the other narrators: the rejoining of George Drouillard and Willard, who had traveled overland from St. Charles. Neither Gass, Floyd, nor Ordway notes their return, though it materially altered the party’s composition.
Mechanics of the Rescue
Clark’s expanded account is the only source preserving the actual sequence of the rescue. He describes the crew’s improvisation in concrete terms: “all hand jumped out on the upper Side and bore on that Side untill the Sand washed from under the boat,” and then, after a third wheeling, “got a rope fast to her Stern and by the means of Swimmers was Carred to Shore.” The detail of swimmers carrying a stern line ashore is precisely the sort of operational specificity that Gass’s “nearly upset” elides. Clark also frames the morning with a notation of military readiness — “examined the mens arms, & Saw that all was prepared for action” — which contextualizes the day as one already keyed to vigilance before the river itself became the threat.
The toponymic record is similarly uneven. All four men, where they write at any length, agree on “Devils race grounds” (Clark, Gass) or “Deavels race ground” (Ordway’s editorial apparatus quoting the journals) for the projecting rocks downriver. The “little quiver” creek (Clark) appears as “queivere” in the editorial gloss to Ordway. These orthographic variants — together with the editorial note that all journalists “labor over” the spelling of Bonhomme Creek and that Clark renders the Femme Osage as “Osage Womans R” while Floyd writes “the wife of Osage River” — confirm a pattern visible across the early journals: each narrator transliterates French and Indigenous names independently, with no evidence of cross-copying on this date.
Register and Authority
The contrast between Floyd’s “Nothing ocord” and Clark’s “the worst I ever Saw” is not a contradiction but a register difference. Floyd, writing as a sergeant whose journal would remain personal, treats the day’s survival as the day’s non-event. Clark, writing as commanding officer and cartographer, treats the same hours as a topographical and operational episode requiring a name, a course bearing (“S 63° W 4 miles”), and a moral. The four entries together demonstrate how thoroughly the meaning of an expedition day depended on who held the pen.
