The entries of September 19, 1804, offer an unusually rich opportunity for cross-narrator comparison. Joseph Whitehouse, Patrick Gass, John Ordway, and William Clark all describe the same sequence of events along the Missouri near present-day Chamberlain: a fine sailing breeze, buffalo swimming the river, the mouths of three small streams the captains identified as a Sioux meeting ground, and a late camp on what Clark christened Night Creek. Yet the four accounts diverge sharply in what each narrator chose to preserve.
A Shared Skeleton, Divergent Flesh
The structural overlap among Whitehouse, Gass, and Ordway is immediately apparent. All three list the same toponyms in the same order — the Sioux pass of the three rivers, Elm Creek, Wash Creek, Night Creek — and all three close with the killing of black-tailed deer by Drouillard. Gass writes:
This river is formed of three, which unite their waters just above its mouth; and immediately above the confluence is a crossing place, called the Sioux-crossing-place of the three rivers. At the upper end, a creek, called Elm creek, comes in on the south side, and two miles above another creek, called Wash creek, falls in on the same side.
Whitehouse’s version is nearly identical in sequence, though his orthography is rougher (“Souix pass over of the three Rivers”) and his sentences shorter. Ordway, by contrast, condenses the three creeks into a single parenthetical — “passed 3 large Creeks (called the Souix 3 river pass)” — suggesting he was less invested in the toponymic catalogue than in narrative flow. The pattern of shared phrasing among Whitehouse and Gass, both enlisted men writing for eventual publication or family circulation, hints at the well-documented practice of journal-sharing within the Corps. Ordway, sergeant of the guard and the most disciplined daily diarist, appears to draw from the same conversational pool but selects differently.
Clark as Source and Outlier
Clark’s entry is the longest and most distinctive, and it almost certainly served as the source from which the enlisted journalists drew their place-names. Only Clark walked ashore to inspect the Sioux ground itself:
I walked on Shore to See this great Pass of the Sioux and Calumet ground, found it a handsom Situation, and Saw the remains of their Campt on the 2d river, for many years passed
This ethnographic and diplomatic note — the recognition of a long-used intertribal peace ground — appears in none of the other journals on this date. Clark’s expanded second draft elaborates further: “those rivers is the place that all nations who meet are at peace with each other.” Ordway preserves a fragment of this idea in his footnoted record but does not develop it. Whitehouse and Gass omit it entirely. Where the enlisted men saw a list of creeks, Clark saw a political geography.
Counting the Kill
The day’s hunting tally also exposes the narrators’ different preoccupations. Clark records his own kills with proprietary precision — “I Killed a fat Buffalow Cow, and a fat Buck elk” — and then catalogues the others: York’s buck, the hunters’ four deer, the boat crew’s two swimming buffalo. Ordway, characteristically attentive to provisioning, specifies that the swimming buffalo included “a fat cow likewise & a small Bull” and notes that the meat and hides were taken aboard the pirogues. Gass reduces the entire day’s hunt to a terse closing line: “Three black tailed deer were killed this day.” Whitehouse splits the difference, naming Fields and Drouillard but giving no totals.
One small detail belongs to Clark alone and shows the captain’s naturalist’s eye: among the four black-tailed deer was “a Buck with two men Prongs on each Side fork.” It is the kind of anatomical specificity that distinguishes Clark’s field observation from the enlisted men’s summary reportage — and a reminder that even when four pens describe one day, the day each man preserves is not quite the same day.
