The entries of August 21, 1804 offer an unusually clear illustration of how labor was divided among the expedition’s record-keepers. As the Corps of Discovery sailed past the mouth of the Big Sioux River under a stiff southerly breeze, four men set pen to paper. Their accounts share a common skeleton — wind, sand, twenty-odd miles, the Sioux River, camp on the south side — but the flesh on those bones varies dramatically.
A Shared Skeleton, Unequal Flesh
The terseness of Joseph Whitehouse’s entry is striking. His full account reduces the day to a single sentence:
we Set out eairly this morning under a hard Breeze from the South. we passed the mouth of the Grand River Souix close ab’ a high Bluff on N.S. wecame 20 odd miles & camped on Sno:
Patrick Gass is scarcely more expansive, listing only “coloured bluffs, willow creek and the Sioux river on the north side” before noting the day’s distance and camp. The two men appear to be working from a similar template — likely the sergeants’ practice of comparing notes at day’s end — but neither has the inclination or perhaps the time to elaborate.
John Ordway, by contrast, gives the day texture. He alone records that the wind forced the crew to “take a reefe in our Sail” and that blowing sand obscured the channel:
the Sand blew So thick from the Sand bars that we could not see the channel far ahead & it filled the air before us about a mile
Ordway also notes the practical adjustment of ballasting the white pirogue with kegs of pork, the wolves observed on a sandbar, and Shannon’s fruitless hunt — all details Whitehouse and Gass omit entirely. Where the other sergeants compress, Ordway preserves the working life of the boats.
Clark’s Two Drafts and the Pipestone Quarry
William Clark’s entry stands apart in both length and ambition. He produced two versions — a field draft and a fuller fair copy — and in the latter he transforms a navigational note into a small piece of regional geography and ethnography. Drawing on intelligence from the engagé Pierre Dorion (“Mr. Durien our Scones intptr.”), Clark records that the Sioux River is
navagable to the falls 70 or 80 Leagues and above these falls Still further, those falls are 200 feet or there abouts & has two princapal pitches, and heads with the St. peters passing the head of the Demoien
This is information no one on the expedition had personally observed; it is hearsay carefully attributed. Clark then pivots to the famous pipestone quarry — what is now Pipestone National Monument in Minnesota — noting that
on the right below the falls a Creek Coms in which passes thro Clifts of red rock which the Indians make pipes of, and when the different nations Meet at those queries all is piece
The detail about inter-tribal peace at the quarry is the single most important ethnographic observation entered by anyone in the Corps that day, and it appears in Clark alone. Ordway, Gass, and Whitehouse all pass the river’s mouth without a word about its cultural significance — a reminder that the sergeants and privates recorded what they saw, while the captains were tasked with absorbing what their interpreters told them.
Patterns of Borrowing and Independent Observation
Comparison of the four entries supports the longstanding view that Whitehouse leaned heavily on Ordway, and Gass on a similar source: the shared phrase “20 odd miles” appears verbatim in Ordway and Whitehouse, and Gass’s structure parallels theirs. Yet Whitehouse’s compression suggests he was abstracting rather than copying wholesale.
Clark, working independently, is also the only narrator to record botanical observation — a fruit “resembling the read Current” growing on a privet-like shrub — and the only one to mention an abandoned Omaha (“Mahars”) village site on the larboard side. Ordway alone closes with the still-unresolved fate of “the man with the horses”, a thread Clark also picks up: “The two men Sent with the horses has not joined us as yet.” That two narrators independently flag the missing party suggests genuine concern within the camp, even as Gass and Whitehouse pass over it in silence.
Read together, the four entries for August 21 demonstrate the layered documentary practice of the expedition: the privates and sergeants supplied the navigational backbone, Ordway added the working detail of the boats, and Clark — alone among them — reached for the geographic and cultural horizons that lay beyond what the Corps could see from the river.
