The July 10, 1804 entries open with a small mystery resolved. A fire spotted on shore the previous night had prompted speculation about whose camp it might be. Clark explains the answer most fully: the men were the expedition’s own hunters, who had “Lay down and fell asleap” and missed the pirogue sent to retrieve them because, as Clark puts it, “the Course of the Wind which blew hard, their yells were not heard.” Floyd offers the same episode in compressed form — “it was ouer men which had Left us two days ago, much feteged” — while Ordway’s account closely tracks Clark’s phrasing, a recurring pattern in the sergeants’ journals.
Pape Creek and the Spaniard’s Suicide
Four of the five narrators record the small creek encountered four miles upstream, though they spell its name four different ways. Clark writes “R. Pape,” Floyd “pape Creek,” Ordway “poke,” and the editorial gloss reconstructs Clark’s other usage as “Pappie.” All agree the stream is roughly fifteen yards wide and named for a Spaniard who killed himself at its mouth. Floyd alone supplies the manner of death:
it is Called after a man who by drawning his Gun out of the Boat Shot him Self
This is the kind of detail Floyd consistently preserves — terse, concrete, and frequently the only source for a specific mechanism behind a place name. Clark and Ordway repeat the bare fact of suicide; Floyd alone reconstructs the accident.
Whitehouse, by contrast, omits Pape Creek entirely. His entry collapses the day’s geography around Wolf River and a breakfast stop, with attention paid instead to subsistence botany: “the will Rice was pleanty Groeing on the bank of the River, Straberyes, Rosies, Red And White Roe?” None of the other narrators mention wild rice or strawberries. Whitehouse’s journal repeatedly foregrounds edible plants where Clark catalogues acreage and Ordway notes distances.
Two Thousand Acres of Wild Rye
The day’s most striking landscape — a bottom prairie opposite Isle de Salamine — receives nearly identical treatment from Clark and Ordway. Both estimate “about 2000 acres,” both note the cover of “wild rye and wild potatoes,” and both record that Lewis killed two goslings that evening. Ordway’s phrasing tracks Clark’s so closely (“Great nombers of Goslins on the Banks and on the Ponds near the River, Capt M. Lewis killed 2 this evening”) that direct borrowing or shared dictation seems likely. Clark’s second draft of the entry adds an observation absent from the first: the bottom is “thickly intersperced with Vines.”
Gass reduces the entire day to two sentences:
fair day and fair wind. There is a handsome prairie on the south side opposite an island. We encamped on the north side.
His brevity here is characteristic. Where Clark devotes a paragraph to the prairie’s dimensions and produce, Gass registers only its handsomeness and the camp’s position. The 2,000-acre estimate, the wild rye, the goslings, the yellow clay cliff opposite camp — none survive in his version.
Health, Fatigue, and the River on a Stand
A quieter cross-narrator thread concerns the men’s condition. Clark notes twice that the party is “getting well but much fatigued” and that “The river is on a Stand nether rise nor fall.” Floyd, writing only a few weeks before his own death, records flatly that “the men is all Sick” — a sharper assessment than Clark’s. The discrepancy is worth noting: Clark frames recovery, Floyd frames illness. Whether this reflects different observational positions within the party or Floyd’s own deteriorating health is impossible to determine from the entries alone, but the divergence is the kind of detail that emerges only when the journals are read against one another.
Ordway’s entry runs past the date boundary into July 11, recording Drewyer’s six deer and Clark’s discovery of a stray grey horse — material that properly belongs to the following day’s analysis but which, in Ordway’s compositional habit, spills forward without a clean break.
