The entries of 25 August 1806 capture a single uneventful day of rapid descent — the captains halting at the mouth of the Cheyenne River for a meridian observation before pressing on to camp some forty-eight miles downstream. Yet the three surviving accounts reveal sharply different documentary registers. Patrick Gass and John Ordway compress the day into the bare arithmetic of miles and deer; William Clark turns the same hours into a layered survey of timber, ruins, and Indigenous absence.
The Sergeants’ Shorthand
Gass and Ordway track the day’s structure almost identically: hunters sent ahead, a halt at the Cheyenne, an observation taken until noon, deer killed, the party reuniting with the advance canoes, and an evening camp. Gass writes that the party
proceeded on early, having sent forward two small canoes with five men to hunt. When we had gone twelve miles, we came to the mouth of the Chien river, where we halted and staid till noon, for the purpose of taking an observation.
Ordway’s parallel notice runs:
we halted at the Mouth of Chyenne river N. Side and our officers conclude to delay untill 12 and take an observa- tion the hunters went out and killed two deer.
The two sergeants diverge mainly in their game tallies. Gass reports three small deer killed at the Cheyenne and three more by the advance hunters; Ordway counts two deer at the halt and “a fat buck & 2 does” taken by those ahead. Such small discrepancies are characteristic of the pair: both men appear to be writing independently from memory at day’s end rather than copying a shared field tally, and neither cross-checks against the other. Their spelling of the river — Gass’s “Chien,” Ordway’s “Chyenne” — likewise reflects independent ears rather than a common manuscript source.
Clark’s Layered Landscape
Clark’s entry, by contrast, treats 25 August as a topographic and historical document. Where the sergeants note simply that the party halted at the Cheyenne, Clark inventories the timber on both banks for miles above and below the confluence, distinguishing a “narrow bottom of Small Cotton trees” on the northeast point from a second cottonwood bottom a quarter mile upstream. He records the scientific result the sergeants only allude to:
we obtained a Meridian altitude with the Sextt. and artificial Horizon 112° 50′ 00″
He also surveys the Cheyenne itself with a settler’s eye, marking
a very eligable Situation on the bank of the Chyenne on it’s lower Side about 100 paces from it’s enterance. this Situation is above the high floods and has a perfect Command of each river
Most strikingly, Clark alone reads the day’s river miles as a palimpsest of recent and older Indigenous presence. He notes passing “the place where we Saw the last encampement of Troubleson Tetons” on the outbound voyage, and observes that the Tetons “have been on the river not long Since.” He counts the ruins of Arikara towns the sergeants pass in silence: a former large village on each side of the river just above the night’s camp “destroyed by the Seioux,” plus “the remains of 5 other villages on the S W. Side below the Chyenne river and one on Le ho catts Isld.” — every one “broken up by the Seioux.”
What the Comparison Reveals
The day exposes the division of documentary labor that had hardened by the return voyage. Gass and Ordway, writing for themselves and for eventual publication of a soldier’s-eye narrative, kept the chronological skeleton: departure, halt, hunt, camp, miles. Clark, still functioning as the expedition’s principal cartographer and ethnographer, used the same hours to record bottom-by-bottom timber descriptions, a sextant reading, a candidate site for future settlement, and a count of destroyed Arikara villages whose ruin he attributes consistently to Sioux pressure.
The sergeants do not so much miss these features as decline to record them — Ordway in particular had stood on the same banks in 1804 and would have known the village ruins were there. The contrast is one of register and assignment, not observation. It also explains why Clark camped early: “The 2 fields and Shannon did not join this evening which caused me to encamp earlier than usial for them,” a small command decision that Gass and Ordway pass over without comment, ending their entries with the camp itself rather than the reasoning behind it.
