The June 10 entries cluster around a single river-mouth landmark — the Two Charitons, joining the Missouri in present Howard County — but the narrators distribute the day’s labor unevenly. Clark measures, Lewis hunts, Ordway and Floyd narrate, Gass compresses, and Whitehouse logs miles and misery. The cross-section reveals how the expedition’s record was already specializing by function less than a month upriver from St. Charles.
One landmark, five widths
Every narrator notes the Two Charitons, and every narrator gives different dimensions. Gass records the mouths as
the first 7o and the other 100 yards wide
— matching Floyd almost verbatim:
the first 70 ya* wide the Next 100 ya” wide and navagable for Some Distance in the Cuntry
. Ordway echoes the same navigability claim without numbers. Whitehouse offers yet another set:
The Bigg Charrottoe is 100 Y* at the mouth… it? Brenth at the mouth is 50 Y* Broad
. Clark, in his field notes, writes 40 and 90 yards; in his elaborated entry he revises to 30 and 70. The numerical disagreement among five men looking at the same confluence on the same afternoon is itself the document — measurement was approximate, copied imperfectly between journals, and revised in the evening.
The Floyd-Gass-Ordway agreement on “70 and 100” suggests the sergeants were comparing notes or working from a shared call-out, while Clark’s lower figures came from his own chain or eye. Whitehouse’s “100 / 50” looks like a garbled transcription of the sergeant consensus.
Division of observational labor
Clark alone records the day’s celestial work:
Came to and took Mdnl. altd. of Sons U. L. back obsvn. with the octant Made it 37° 12′ 00″, delayed 11/2 Hour
. Floyd notes only the delay (“Delayed 14 ouers” — likely 1½ hours mis-transcribed) without explaining its purpose. Gass omits the observation entirely and instead supplies a fact no other narrator preserves: that the party
remained there the whole of the next day, the wind blowing too violent for us to proceed
. Gass’s habit of collapsing two days into one entry is on display here — his June 10 already anticipates June 11.
Lewis is silent (no Lewis entry survives for the date), but he is the most-cited figure in the others’ journals. Ordway, Floyd, and Clark all record his buck. Ordway adds that
Capte went hunting, Several men with them. Drewyer killed a Deer
— the only entry to credit Drouillard. Lewis’s actions are visible only through the others’ eyes, a pattern that recurs throughout the outbound journey.
The Osage plum and the prairie aesthetic
Clark’s entry, uniquely, turns botanical and almost lyrical at evening. Walking three miles inland with Lewis, he finds
a Plumb which grows on bushes the hight of Hasle, those plumbs are in great numbers, the bushes beare Verry full, about double the Sise of the wild plumb Called the Osage Plumb
. In his expanded version he goes further, drawing an explicit contrast between western and eastern prairies:
Those Praries are not like those, or a number of those E. of the Mississippi Void of every thing except grass, they abound with Hasel Grapes & a wild plumb of a Superior quallity
. This is Clark working as comparative naturalist, a register absent from the sergeants’ entries. Ordway notices mulberries —
plenty of Mulbery Trees, the mulberys Ripe on them
— and lists timber species, but does not theorize the landscape.
Whitehouse, characteristically, reduces the day to a logistical summary: hunters awaited, horses swum, men ferried, mosquitoes suffered, thirteen miles made. His entry contains no plums, no octant, no buck. Where Ordway typically supplies the model Whitehouse copies, June 10 shows Whitehouse working from a thinner template — possibly his own — and arriving at the briefest entry of the five.
The composite picture: a Sunday of swift current and an enforced halt at a prairie mouth, with the captains taking a noon altitude, Lewis killing a buck, the two of them walking inland at dusk, and Clark — alone — registering that the country had begun to feel categorically different from anything east of the Mississippi.
