The journal entries for May 23, 1804 offer an unusually rich opportunity for cross-narrator comparison. All four men present—Patrick Gass, Joseph Whitehouse, Charles Floyd, and William Clark—record the same sequence of events along a short stretch of the Missouri: the mouth of the Osage Womans River, a stop at a riverside cave the French called the Tavern, and an evening inspection of arms. Yet the four accounts differ markedly in length, vocabulary, and the events they deem worth preserving.
A Shared Itinerary, Four Registers
Gass produces the most compressed account, treating the day as a transit log. He notes the Osage river mouth, identifies the Tavern as “a noted place among the French traders,” mentions Tavern Creek, and closes with the inspection of arms and ammunition. There is no measurement of the cave, no mention of inscriptions, and no reference to Lewis’s climb.
Whitehouse and Floyd, by contrast, both reach for dimensions. Whitehouse describes the cave as
a noted [place called cave tavern in a clift of rocks on [the] South Side, which is 120 feet long 20 per-pinticular high
Floyd’s figures are nearly identical but more elaborated:
the tavern or Cave a noted place on the South Side of the River 120 Long 20 feet in Debth 40 feet purpendickler
The close agreement on “120” feet of length—and the divergence on height (Whitehouse’s 20 feet “perpinticular,” Floyd’s 40)—suggests the enlisted men were sharing observations or a common source rather than measuring independently. Clark, writing with the authority of a commanding officer’s notebook, gives different figures still: “a Cave 40 yds. long with the river 4 feet Deep & about 20 feet high.” The discrepancy among the three sets of numbers is itself revealing: no narrator on this day appears to have applied a chain or line to the rock.
What Only Clark Records
Clark’s two-part entry—a field draft and a fuller revision—captures material entirely absent from the enlisted men’s journals. He alone notes the morning’s accident, when the boat “run on a log under water and Detained one hour.” He alone records the diplomatic exchange with eight “Kick.” Indians who brought meat and received whisky in return. And he alone preserves the cultural texture of the Tavern itself:
this is a place the Indians & french Pay omage to, many names are wrote up on the rock Mine among others
That parenthetical confession—that Clark added his own name to the graffiti—is the kind of personal aside the official commander permitted himself but that Gass, Floyd, and Whitehouse omit. Whitehouse’s revised entry echoes the observation in more neutral form (“the Inds & French pay omage. many hams [names] are wrote on the rock”), suggesting Whitehouse later had access to Clark’s account or heard it discussed.
Lewis on the Cliff
The most dramatic episode of the day appears in only two of the four journals. Clark reports that Lewis ascended the cliffs above the Tavern
and was near falling from a Peninsulia hard water all Day Saved himself by the assistance of his Knife
Whitehouse’s expanded entry corroborates and heightens the moment: the cliffs are “300 fee high, hanging over the Water,” and “Capt. Lewis near falling from the Pencelia of rocks 300 feet, he caught at 20 foot.” The convergence between Clark and Whitehouse—on a detail Gass and Floyd both omit—again hints that Whitehouse’s fuller passages drew on Clark’s narrative or on conversation around the captain’s table. Gass, often considered a careful but spare diarist, evidently did not regard the near-accident as part of the day’s official record. Floyd, whose entry otherwise tracks Floyd’s habit of recording cave dimensions and creek names, likewise lets the climb pass in silence.
The pattern across these four entries is consistent with what scholars have long observed for the early weeks of the voyage: Clark establishes the master narrative; Whitehouse expands and sometimes copies; Floyd attends to measurable features; and Gass keeps the lean log of a working sergeant. May 23 is a useful miniature of that division of labor—and a reminder that a single afternoon at a single cliff produced four quite different documents.
