The journals of April 10, 1805 capture the expedition’s second full day west of Fort Mandan, with all four principal narrators—Meriwether Lewis, William Clark, Patrick Gass, and John Ordway—producing entries that converge on the same handful of events while diverging sharply in detail and register. The encounter with three French beaver trappers, the burning bluff with its sulphurous smoke, the Hidatsa onlookers, and the troublesome mosquitoes appear unevenly across the four accounts, offering an unusually clear window into how each narrator selected and shaped his material.
Shared Events, Divergent Detail
Lewis produces the day’s fullest account. He alone records the Hidatsa (Minetare) gathering on the larboard shore three miles out: “passed some Minetares who had assembled themselves on the Lard shore to take a view of our little fleet.” Clark, walking on shore much of the day, mentions only “a camp of Inds. on the L. S.” Gass omits the encounter entirely, while Ordway—who otherwise records considerable detail—also passes over it. The contrast is characteristic: Lewis often supplies ethnographic and diplomatic framing where the others see only an incident.
The meeting with the French trappers, by contrast, registers in three of the four journals. Ordway gives the most vivid social detail, noting that the Frenchmen “had Caught 12 beaver in a fiew days they were fat they Gave us the tails and Some of the meat which eat verry Good.” Lewis converts the same encounter into strategic and commercial observation:
these people avail themselves of the protection which our numbers will enable us to give them against the Assinniboins who sometimes hunt on the Missouri and intend ascending with us as far as the mouth of the Yellow stone river and continue there hunt up that river. this is the first essay of a beaver hunter of any discription on this river.
Clark compresses the same event into a single clause—”we over took 3 french men Trappers”—while Gass omits the meeting altogether. The pattern recurs throughout the day’s entries: Gass reduces, Clark abbreviates, Ordway narrates, and Lewis interprets.
The Burning Bluff and the Question of Sources
The smoldering coal bluff offers an especially clear case of textual relationship. Lewis writes that “the bluff is now on fire and throws out considerable quantities of smoke which has a strong sulphurious smell,” tying the observation to his ongoing notes on coal seams in the river bluffs. Clark’s version is markedly thinner and apparently secondhand:
the Coal Continue to day, one man Saw a hill on fire at no great distance from the river
Because Clark spent hours walking on shore hunting antelope, he evidently did not see the bluff himself and relied on a report from another member of the party—possibly Lewis. Ordway and Gass do not mention the fire at all, suggesting it was visible only from a particular point on the river or was reported chiefly among the officers. The episode illustrates how the captains’ parallel journals are not independent: Clark’s brief notice almost certainly derives from Lewis’s fuller observation, even as Clark adds the detail (“one man Saw”) that Lewis does not supply.
Register and the Shape of a Day
Gass’s entry, the briefest of the four, reduces the day to weather, distance, and camp:
but a fine pleasant day. Having proceeded about nineteen miles we encamped on the North side.
His mileage—nineteen—differs notably from Ordway’s “about 27 mls,” a discrepancy that recurs throughout the expedition and reflects the rougher reckoning of the sergeants’ journals. Ordway, by contrast, fills his entry with sensory and incidental detail absent elsewhere: the “falling in Sand bank,” the eagles nesting in cottonwoods, the prairie hen Clark killed before rejoining the party, and a small writerly aside that his colleagues never indulge—”one of our men Shot a bald Eagle. I took the quills to write.” That single sentence, recording the literal instrument of his own composition, is the kind of self-conscious detail that distinguishes Ordway’s voice from the more impersonal narration of the captains.
Lewis alone steps back to characterize the country at scale, describing “one continued level fertile plain as far as the eye can reach, in which there is not even a solitary tree or shrub to be seen except such as from their moist situations or the steep declivities of hills are sheltered from the ravages of the fire.” Where Gass measures the day in miles, Ordway in incidents, and Clark in compressed summary, Lewis measures it in landscape and consequence—the four journals together producing a fuller record than any one alone could supply.
