The journal entries for May 18, 1804, written while the Corps of Discovery was still encamped at St. Charles, Missouri, offer an unusually clean illustration of how three contemporaneous narrators could process the same calendar day through entirely different documentary lenses. William Clark produces two overlapping administrative drafts; Joseph Whitehouse files a brief social vignette; Charles Floyd writes a single sentence. Read together, the entries function less as corroborating accounts than as a demonstration of register, audience, and rank within the expedition’s writing culture.
Clark’s Double Draft: The Captain as Quartermaster
Clark’s two versions of the May 18 entry — a field note and a slightly polished revision — share the same skeleton: a celestial observation, a redistribution of cargo, the return of a courier, and the arrival of two keel boats. The opening astronomical reading is reproduced verbatim in both drafts:
took equal altitude and made it 97° 42′ 37″ M. A
The repetition signals what Clark considered the day’s load-bearing fact. Equally telling is his attention to trim. Clark writes that he
had the Boat & Pierogue reloded So as to Cause them to be heavyer in bow than asturn
and in the second draft refines the phrasing to
I had the loading in the Boat & perogue examined and changed So as the Bow of each may be heavyer laded than the Stern
The shift from the blunt “reloded” to “examined and changed” suggests Clark was already smoothing the field draft toward a more presentable record — likely the version intended for eventual transmission to Jefferson or for retention as the official log. The second draft also adds a commercial detail absent from the first: the Kentucky keel boats are now
loaded with whiskey Hats &c.
That cargo specification appears nowhere in his initial pass, suggesting Clark gathered the information later in the day and folded it into the cleaner version. Conversely, the first draft preserves small generosities — Mr. Ducett’s gift of “rivr Catts & Some Herbs,” the French hands bringing “eggs milk &c.” — that the polished draft strips out. The revision moves toward officialdom by shedding the texture of camp life.
Whitehouse and Floyd: The Ranks Below
Joseph Whitehouse, an enlisted private, registers the same day in a single sentence that captures what Clark’s tightening prose excises. Where Clark inventories tobacco poundage and tin cups, Whitehouse writes:
a fair morning. we bought some acceseries &c. for the voiage. passed the evening verry agreeable dancing with the french ladies, &c.
The two accounts are not contradictory — Clark’s “French hands bring me eggs milk” hints at the same cordial relations with the St. Charles community — but Whitehouse foregrounds the sociability that Clark, writing as commanding officer, files only as background. Whitehouse’s “we bought some acceseries” is also the soldier’s-eye complement to Clark’s “Gave out tin Cups & 3 Knives to the French hands”: the captain distributes, the private purchases.
Sergeant Charles Floyd, by contrast, offers the day’s starkest entry:
we Lay at S’ Charles
Five words. Floyd’s journal across the early weeks of the voyage tends toward this kind of compression — a logbook of locations rather than events. On a day when the boats did not move, Floyd evidently saw nothing requiring elaboration. The entry’s brevity is itself information: it confirms that no departure occurred, that no incident rose to the level Floyd considered noteworthy, and that for at least one sergeant, the writing duty was a matter of marking time, not narrating it.
Cross-Narrator Pattern
No copying is in evidence among the three accounts; the divergences in vocabulary, length, and content are too great. What the trio illustrates instead is a stratification of expedition record-keeping. Clark writes for posterity and command, drafting and redrafting; Whitehouse writes for himself, capturing mood and society; Floyd writes for the calendar. The May 18 cluster is a useful baseline against which later, more dramatic days — when all three narrators converge on a single event — can be measured. Even at rest in St. Charles, the expedition was already producing the divided documentary record that scholars continue to triangulate.
