The entries of Patrick Gass, John Ordway, and William Clark for August 27, 1806, all describe the same stretch of the Missouri: the Corps’ rapid descent past the mouth of the Teton River and around the Great Bend. Yet the three accounts vary so widely in compression and emphasis that they read almost as different events. Gass and Ordway, both enlisted men keeping journals that would later be compared and edited, supply terse hunting logs. Clark, writing as commanding officer, layers geography, ecological observation, and a private worry about Lewis’s health.
Hunting Reports and the Buffalo Economy
All three narrators frame the day around meat. Clark explains the urgency directly: “our Stock of meat being now exousted and this the most favourable place to precure a fresh Supply.” That managerial concern is absent from the enlisted accounts, which simply record the kills. Ordway notes that the party
procd on on passed the Mouth of Teton river and passing round the grand turn or grand bend we killed an Elk and took on board all the meat in the evening we Camped on a large Island which was covd with thin timber and tall grass where we killed 4 out of a large gang [of buffalo] and Saved the best of the meat.
Gass’s version is nearly identical in sequence—elk at the lower end of the bend, buffalo on an island—but he counts three buffalo rather than four:
at the lower end of which we killed an elk. As we were passing an island we saw a gang of buffaloe feeding on it; when we halted and killed three of them, and encamped on the island for the night.
The closeness of phrasing (“gang” of buffalo, the elk at the bend’s lower end, the island camp) suggests the familiar pattern of enlisted journalists comparing notes or drawing on shared daily report. The discrepancy in number—three versus four—is the kind of small divergence that survives such cross-pollination. Clark’s tally differs again: “two Cows one Bull and a Calf,” four animals total, with the explicit note that “nether of them wer fat.”
What Only Clark Records
Clark’s entry preserves observations the enlisted men omit entirely. He registers the ecological aftermath of a recent buffalo herd—”the bottoms were entirely beaten up and the grass laid flat by the emence number of Buffalow which had been here a Short time past”—and notes the disappearance of deer from those trampled bottoms. He alone marks a faunal threshold: “here we discover the first Signs of the wild turkey,” a southerly species reappearing as the Corps descends. He alone explains the hunters’ restraint, observing that the bulls “were unfit for use,” and he alone gives the auditory cue that prompted the evening hunt: “we herd the bellowing of the Buffalow Bulls in the lower Isld. of the Big bend.”
Most strikingly, Clark closes with a confidence neither Gass nor Ordway shares:
My friend Capt Lewis hurt himself very much by takeing a longer walk on the Sand bar in my absence at the buffalow than he had Strength to undergo, which Caused him to remain very unwell all night.
Lewis, still recovering from the gunshot wound received from Pierre Cruzatte on August 11, had overexerted himself. The detail is private command business—an officer’s concern for his co-captain, recorded with the warmth of “My friend”—and it does not surface in the enlisted journals at all. Whether Gass and Ordway did not know, or did not consider it their place to record, the silence is consistent with the register difference between the two strands of the journal record.
Geography and Editorial Layering
Gass’s account, as published, carries an additional voice: the editor’s footnote on longitude. The note compares “what Mr. Gass calls the great bend” with the “northern bend” identified by David Thompson of the North West Company in 1798, and uses the equation to argue that contemporary maps placed the Mandan villages roughly twenty degrees too far west. This editorial apparatus, absent from Ordway’s and Clark’s manuscript entries, illustrates how Gass’s published journal was shaped after the fact into a work of corrective geography, while Clark’s field journal remains an operational record. Gass continues with the next day’s entry (August 28) and the return to “Pleasant camp,” where the captains hoped to recover skeletons of mule deer and pronghorn (“cabre”)—a scientific errand that Clark’s August 27 entry has not yet reached.
Together the three entries demonstrate how a single day on the Missouri produces, in three hands, a hunting log, a near-duplicate hunting log, and a commander’s composite of geography, ecology, and quiet anxiety.
