The expedition’s progress on July 20, 1804 — a cool, foggy morning along the lower Missouri above the future site of Nebraska City — produced unusually rich parallel coverage. Five narrators wrote: Clark (twice, in field notes and a fair copy), Ordway, Gass, Whitehouse, and Floyd. Lewis is silent. The day’s anchor event for every journalist is the passage of a single tributary the French called l’Eau qui pleure — the Weeping Water — but each narrator preserves a different slice of the day around it.
One creek, five renderings
Clark gives the fullest etymology, naming the stream
l’Eue-que pleure, or the the Water Which Cry’s
and locating it above a clift of brown clay opposite a willow island. Gass compresses the same information into a single clause —
a creek, called the Water-which-cries, or the Weeping stream
— characteristically terse. Ordway calls it
weeping water creek or the creek which Cryes
, hewing close to Clark’s phrasing. Floyd alone gives the width as
about 35 yards wide
, where Clark estimates 25 and Whitehouse 20; the disagreement is itself a reminder that no instrument was used. Whitehouse, working in his roughest orthography, fixes a different detail: the party
Breakfasted In the Mouth of it
, a domestic note absent from every other journal.
Floyd is also the only narrator to record a second tributary on the opposite bank:
passed a Creek on the N. Side Called Piggen Creek
. Neither Clark, Ordway, Gass, nor Whitehouse mentions it. Whether Floyd misheard “Pigeon” or noted a stream the others let pass, his entry preserves a name that would otherwise be lost from the day’s record.
Clark’s prairie walk
The longest narrative belongs to Clark, who left the boat at the creek mouth with Reuben Fields and walked overland in search of elk. He found none, but his entry contains the day’s most vivid kill —
I killed an emence large yellow Wolf
— and the day’s most considered landscape judgment, that the soil
appears rich but much Parched with the frequent fires
. Ordway acknowledges the excursion in passing (“Cap*. Clark & R. Fields went on Shore after Breakfast”) and credits Clark with finding
an excelent Spring on the South Side near a small pond
. Gass, Floyd, and Whitehouse record the spring and the clay cliff but say nothing of the wolf or the failed elk hunt. The pattern is consistent across the journals: when a captain leaves the boat, the enlisted men’s entries shrink to the boat’s perspective.
What only the comparison reveals
Three details emerge only when the entries are read against one another. First, Drouillard’s illness: Ordway opens with
George Drewyer Sick
and Clark confirms it; Whitehouse, Gass, and Floyd omit the hunter entirely, though Whitehouse’s later entry notes Drouillard rejoining with four deer. Second, Bratton’s predicament: Clark alone records that
Bratten Swam the river to get his gun & Clothes left last night
— a small disciplinary embarrassment scrubbed from every other account. Third, the boat’s company killed only two deer (Joseph Fields, per Ordway and Clark), and the meat economy passes without comment in Gass and Whitehouse.
Clark’s fair copy adds a reflection absent from his field notes and from every other narrator:
It is wothey of observation to mention that our party has been much healthier on the Voyage than parties of the Same Number is in any other Situation
, qualified only by a remark that boils — “Turners” — have been troublesome. The sentence is the kind of summary judgment Clark inserted as he revised, and it would be invisible without the doubled Clark text.
Whitehouse’s manuscript, the editor notes, shifts hands mid-page; his entry runs forward into July 21 and the Platte itself. The bleed is not unusual for Whitehouse, whose journal in this stretch repeatedly absorbs the next day’s events before the date heading catches up. Read together, the five entries do not contradict so much as triangulate: Clark supplies geography and reflection, Ordway the chronology of who went ashore when, Floyd the additional toponym, Whitehouse the breakfast and the wind, Gass the bare skeleton.
