On 16 September 1806, the Corps of Discovery — by now well into its homeward descent of the Missouri — encountered a procession of upriver-bound trading parties laden with merchandise for the Pawnee, Kansa, and other nations. Three narrators logged the day’s meetings, and the comparison reveals sharp differences in what each man considered worth recording.
A Shared Itinerary, Three Registers
All three accounts agree on the basic sequence: an early start, a morning meeting with a pirogue bound for the Pawnees on the Platte, a second meeting near midday with a keelboat and two canoes, and an evening camp on an island. Patrick Gass, characteristically terse, compresses the entire day into five sentences:
ceeded on early, and at 9 o’clock met a large periogue with eight men, going to trade with the Ponis nation of Indians on the river Platte about seventy or eighty miles from its mouth. At 11 we met a batteaux and two canoes going up to the Kanowas nation, who live on a river of the same name.
Gass supplies useful geographic detail — the distance of the Pawnee trading destination from the mouth of the Platte — but suppresses every diplomatic and political dimension of the encounter. For Gass, these are simply boats met and passed.
John Ordway and William Clark, by contrast, both linger over the second meeting. Ordway names the proprietor as “Mr Reubode of Su1d57 Louis” and notes that the keelboat “was under the charge of Mr Reubados Son.” Clark identifies him as “young Mr. Bobidoux” — both narrators are wrestling with the surname Robidoux. Ordway’s count of “about 20 frenchman in Company” gives the encounter a scale that Clark omits.
The Passport Problem
The most revealing convergence between Ordway and Clark concerns the captains’ inspection of the trader’s license, an episode Gass entirely ignores. Clark, writing in the register of a commanding officer assessing legal documents, expresses pointed skepticism:
the licenes of this young man was to trade with the Panias Mahars and ottoes reather an extroadanary a license for young a man and without the Seal of the teritory anexed, as Genl. Wilkensons Signeture was not to this instrement we were Somewhat doubtfull of it. Mr. Browns Signeture we were not acquainted with without the Teritorial Seal.
Clark’s concerns are procedural and bureaucratic: the breadth of the license, the missing territorial seal, the unfamiliar signature of “Mr Brown” in place of General Wilkinson’s. Ordway preserves the diplomatic content of the captains’ response — the substance of the warning delivered to the young trader:
our officers gave instructions to this trador after reading his passport directing them not to speak against the government of the United States to the Indians as his brothers did to the Zotoes last winter
Clark echoes this in slightly softer language, recording that the captains “Cautioned him against prosueing the Steps of his brother in attempting to degrade the American Charector in the eyes of the Indians.” The two accounts reinforce one another: Ordway, the sergeant, captures the directive as instruction (“directing them not to speak against the government”); Clark, the officer who delivered it, frames it as caution against degrading “the American Charector.” Both versions point to a recent incident the previous winter involving Robidoux’s brother and the Otoes — a piece of intelligence the Corps had evidently absorbed during its westward journey or its winter at Fort Mandan.
Heat, Distance, and What Each Man Notices
Beyond the trading encounters, each journalist preserves details the others omit. Clark alone tabulates the day’s mileage (“haveing Came 52 miles only to day”) and locates the evening camp by reference to an earlier outbound campsite (“a little above our encampment of the 16th & 17th of June 1804”) — a navigational habit that distinguishes the captains’ journals from the enlisted men’s. Clark and Ordway both register the oppressive heat; Ordway notes “the day verry warm indeed,” while Clark elaborates that “the men rowed but little” because of it.
Ordway alone records two further encounters: a meeting with two French hunters whose canoe came out to the boats, bringing word that “an american Boat was on their way coming up Some distance below,” and a glimpse of “a black bear which run [into] a thicket of bushes.” These details suggest Ordway’s journal-keeping practice on this date was the most attentive to incidental observation, while Gass economized ruthlessly and Clark prioritized the official and the navigational.
