The expedition’s journals for September 6, 1804, offer a useful case study in how three narrators operating side by side on the Missouri produced markedly different records of a single day. The keelboat was struggling above the mouth of the Niobrara River, fighting wind, sandbars, and cold, while Private John Colter returned from a hunt without having located the missing George Shannon. All three extant journalists — Captain William Clark, Sergeant John Ordway, and Private Joseph Whitehouse — note the day, but each frames it differently.
Clark’s Navigational Frame
Clark’s two drafts for the date concentrate almost exclusively on weather, river conditions, and landscape. He opens with
a Storm this morning from the N W. at day light which lasted a fiew minits
and proceeds to log the passage of an island, the "hard wind ahead," the "verry Cold" morning, and the lack of timber that forced an early camp. His hunting note is minimal: "R. Fields killed 2 Deer Saw Buffalow, & Goats this evening." Clark, the expedition’s principal cartographer and river-reader, treats the day as a problem of navigation and terrain. Notably absent from Clark’s entry is any mention of Colter’s return or the Shannon situation — a striking omission given that the editorial footnote attached to Ordway’s journal indicates Clark elsewhere reported sign of Shannon ahead of his pursuer. On this date, however, Clark’s interest is the river.
Ordway’s Inventory and the Towing Line
Ordway, by contrast, produces by far the longest and most textured entry. He alone records the labor of the day:
could not make much headway with the oars nor poles & were oblidged to cross over on N. S. & make use of the Towing line, the current Swift & Shallow
He alone describes the "verry long Strait high Raged yallow clifts" on the south side — a landscape detail Clark, surprisingly, leaves out. Ordway also captures the moment the boat grounded: "the Boat got fast on the Sand bar… the men all out Got whiskey." The whiskey ration issued after the soaking is the kind of small, morale-relevant detail that the sergeant, responsible for the men, was positioned to notice and preserve.
Ordway’s hunting tally is also the most expansive of the three: Colter’s haul of "one Buffelow, one Elk, 3 Deer one wolf 5 Turkies & one Goose one Beaver," plus Reuben Field’s deer and fawn. He further notes the camp "at a handsome Bottom prarie on N. S. above a fine Grove of C. wood Timber" — directly contradicting Clark’s claim that "no timber being in reach." The discrepancy is small but telling: Clark wrote at the moment of camping, frustrated by scarcity; Ordway wrote with the cottonwood grove in view.
Whitehouse’s Compression
Whitehouse’s entry is the briefest, and its relationship to Ordway’s is conspicuous:
a cloudy morning Several hunters out hunting. colter joined us had not found Shannon. the hunters killed 1 Buffalow one Elk 3 Deer one woolf 1 Deer & four Turkies.
The game list closely tracks Ordway’s — buffalo, elk, three deer, wolf — though Whitehouse drops the goose and beaver, gives four turkeys rather than five, and adds a separate "1 Deer." The pattern of near-but-imperfect overlap with Ordway is consistent with Whitehouse’s documented practice of working from, or alongside, the sergeants’ journals while introducing his own slips and abbreviations. Whitehouse preserves the Shannon-and-Colter thread that Clark omits, but strips out the cliffs, the towing line, the sandbar, and the whiskey.
What Each Narrator Counts
The three entries together illustrate a recurring division of attention in the expedition’s record. Clark records the river and the weather; Ordway records the labor, the landscape, and the men; Whitehouse compresses, leaning on Ordway’s framework but anchoring his own day around the hunters and the unresolved fate of Shannon. Read singly, each entry is thin. Read together, they reconstruct a cold, wind-blown day of cordelling beneath yellow cliffs, a grounded keelboat, a whiskey ration, and a hunter still missing somewhere ahead on the prairie.
