June 24, 1804 finds the Corps moving past Hay Cabbin Creek and the rocky stretch the captains called Sharriton Carta, jerking meat at midday against the heat and camping on the south bank after roughly thirteen miles. The route facts are uncontroversial — Gass, Ordway, Whitehouse, Floyd, and Clark all agree on the broad shape of the day. What makes the entries worth reading together is how unevenly they distribute the day’s most arresting details.
Clark Alone in the Bottom
Clark had spent the previous night ashore and rejoined the boat at eight. The interval before reunion produced the day’s strangest passage, recorded nowhere else:
dureing the time I lay on the band waiting for the boat, a large Snake Swam to the bank imediately under the Deer which was hanging over the water, and no great distance from it, I threw chunks and drove this Snake off Several times. I found that he was So determined on getting to the meet I was Compelld to Kill him, the part of the Deer which attracted this Snake I think was the milk from the bag of the Doe.
The reasoning — that lactating tissue, not the meat itself, drew the snake — is the kind of field-naturalist inference that distinguishes Clark’s prose from the enlisted men’s. Ordway, Gass, Floyd, and Whitehouse all knew Clark brought in deer and a bear that morning; none mention the snake, suggesting Clark either did not narrate it at the boat or the others judged it unworthy of their journals. Clark also supplies the day’s ecological frame: bear sign “in all Directions thro the bottoms in Serch of Mulberries.” Floyd notes only that “Bear is also plenty in the bottoms” without explaining why.
The Hunters’ Tally Drifts
Cross-narrator comparison exposes how quickly small facts mutate. Ordway itemizes the kills with a clerk’s care: Drouillard two deer, Reuben Field one, Lewis a deer and turkey, Collins three deer — eight deer total, plus the bear and turkey. Floyd, writing more compactly, gives the same aggregate: “ouer Hununters Killed 8 Deer.” Whitehouse echoes the figure — “the hunters kill 8 deer” — and adds the curious detail that one came from “a board the white peerouge,” shot from the vessel itself. Gass omits the count entirely, mentioning only Clark’s two deer and bear. The bear that anchors Gass’s and Ordway’s morning vanishes from Whitehouse’s and Floyd’s accounts of the noon halt.
The creek names show similar drift. Ordway calls it “Creek of the Hay Cabbins”; Gass renders it “Depie” (apparently a corruption); Floyd writes “Hay Creek”; Clark gives the etymology — “from camps of Straw built on it.” Whitehouse, characteristically, garbles it as “the Straw Hill,” suggesting he was working from imperfect memory or a misheard reading rather than copying Ordway directly on this day. The Whitehouse-from-Ordway pattern documented elsewhere in the journals does not hold cleanly here; Whitehouse’s entry is shorter, vaguer, and introduces errors (“Straw Hill,” the unexplained crossing to the west shore at noon) that Ordway’s text would have corrected.
Two Creeks or One
Floyd is the only narrator to distinguish two separate creeks on the north side: “Charriton Creek” and, just below it, “the Creek of the Bad Rock,” fifteen yards wide. Clark and Ordway conflate the rocky stretch with the creek above it; Gass mentions only an unnamed creek on the north side; Whitehouse omits the second creek altogether. For a sergeant whose journal would close with his death six weeks later, Floyd’s attention to channel-width measurements — forty yards, thirty yards, fifteen yards — gives his June entries a surveyor’s precision the others lack on this date.
Read together, the five accounts converge on a routine river day and then diverge sharply on what was worth preserving: Clark on animal behavior and landscape ecology, Ordway and Floyd on hunter accountancy and creek topography, Gass on bare itinerary, Whitehouse on a confused echo of the others. The snake under the hanging doe survives only because Clark wrote alone on the bank.
