The departure from St. Charles on 21 May 1804 marks the Corps of Discovery’s first westward push after rendezvousing at the small French village above the mouth of the Missouri. Four narrators left entries for the day—Captain William Clark, Sergeants John Ordway and Charles Floyd, and Private Joseph Whitehouse—offering a rare four-way comparison of how the same hours were transcribed at different ranks of the party.
Compression and Expansion
Floyd’s entry is the most compressed. In a single line he records:
Left St Charles at 4 oclk. P m Showerey encamped on the N Side of the River
Ordway’s parallel entry is nearly as terse, adding only that the men were "in high Spirits" and naming the two men—Drouillard and Willard—left behind on business. The verbal overlap between the two sergeants ("Showery" / "Showerey," "Encamped on the N. Side of the River") suggests the shared sergeant’s-log tradition that scholars have long noted: the noncommissioned officers kept structurally similar entries, possibly comparing notes or drawing on a common daily template.
Whitehouse, the private, expands considerably. He alone preserves the ceremonial detail of the send-off:
fired our bow peace and gave three cheers, and proceeded on in good heart
Where Floyd and Ordway record only the bare fact of departure, Whitehouse captures the sound of it—the swivel gun on the keelboat’s bow and the answering cheer. He also notes the supply work that preceded the launch ("we took on board Some more provision bread &c.") and the departure of two Frenchmen back to the village, a detail Clark renders as "3 french men" rather than two.
The Captain’s Double Entry
Clark, characteristically, wrote the day twice—once as a field note and again in a fuller journal version. His field entry sets departure at "three oClock," while his expanded version specifies "half passed three oClock." Both contradict Floyd and Ordway, who give four o’clock. The discrepancy may reflect the difference between casting off and actually clearing the bank, or simply the imprecision of timepieces distributed across a moving party.
Clark alone records the social texture of the morning:
Dine with Mr. Ducete & Set out from St. Charles at three oClock after getting every matter arranged
The dinner with Mr. Ducett (Charles Tayon dit Ducett, a local notable) appears in no other journal. Clark also alone preserves the "three Cheers from the gentlemen on the bank"—the answering cheer to Whitehouse’s bow gun. Reading the two accounts together reconstructs the ceremony: the keelboat fires its swivel, the assembled villagers cheer back, and the party pushes into the current.
The Storm
All four narrators register the rain, but with strikingly different intensity. Floyd writes "Showerey"; Ordway, "Showery"; Whitehouse, "Some rainy." Clark, by contrast, calls it
a Violent rain with Wind from the S. W.
and in the expanded version, "a hard Wind from the W. S W accompanied with a hard rain, which lasted with Short intervales all night." His field note adds the emphatic "rains powerfully."
The contrast is instructive. The sergeants and the private, writing brief retrospective notes, summarize the weather as a passing nuisance. Clark, attentive to navigation, records wind direction, duration, and severity—data the captains would need for the journey upstream. He also alone preserves topographic detail: the camp at the upper point of the first island, a small creek entering on the starboard side opposite, another at the island’s head on the larboard side, and the bearings ("N. 15° W 1¾ Ms N 52° W") that would anchor the day to the developing map (his "Fig. 2").
Patterns
The day exemplifies a pattern that will hold across the expedition’s first months: Floyd and Ordway as parallel, minimal sergeant-chroniclers; Whitehouse as the enlisted observer most attuned to ceremony, sound, and human detail; and Clark as the surveyor-captain, layering courses, distances, weather, and topography onto a fuller social narrative. No one narrator’s account suffices on its own. Read together, they restore an afternoon of arranging gear, dining with a French host, firing the bow gun to answering cheers, and then beating three miles upriver into a violent squall to camp on a wet island.
