The expedition’s journals for June 16, 1804 offer a useful case study in how three narrators — sergeants Patrick Gass and John Ordway, and Captain William Clark — translated a single day of hard upstream labor into very different documentary records. All three men encamped on the same north-side bank above a treacherous sandbar near the Boonville reach of the Missouri. Yet the entries diverge in length, focus, and tone in ways that illuminate the layered nature of expedition record-keeping.
Compression Versus Detail
Gass’s entry is the most compressed. His surviving text mentions only the search for oar timber, the cloudy weather, the rapid water, and the north-side camp:
for timber to make oars, but could find none suitable. On their return we continued our voyage; had cloudy weather and rapid water all day and encamped on the north side.
The brevity is characteristic of Gass, whose journal — later edited heavily for its 1807 publication — often reduces a day’s events to a few summary clauses. Ordway, by contrast, lingers on the physical labor demanded by the current:
the Current is verry Strong all this day So that we were obledged to waid & Toe the boat over sand bars, &C. we encamped on the North Side of the River Jest above a verry bad Sand bar
Where Gass abstracts the day into weather and water, Ordway specifies the bodily response: men in the water, hauling the keelboat by towline. His phrase “verry bad Sand bar” anticipates the same hazard that Clark develops at length.
Clark’s two entries — a field-course log and a fuller narrative — together dwarf the sergeants’ accounts. He alone preserves the morning rendezvous with the hunters Drouillard and Willard (“Drewer & Willard had camped & had with them 2 bear & 2 Deer”), the precise compass bearings of the day’s traverse, and the dramatic decision at the sandbar itself:
I found Som indifferent timber and Struck the river above the Boat at a bad Sand bar the worst I had Seen which the boat must pass or Drop back Several Miles & Stem a Swift Current on the opsd Side of an Isd. the Boat however assended the middle of the Streem which was diffucult Dangerious
The captain’s account elevates the sandbar from a navigational nuisance (Ordway) or an unmentioned background (Gass) to a moment of genuine peril requiring command judgment.
What Each Narrator Notices
The most striking divergence is what each man considers worth preserving beyond the river itself. Clark alone records the search for the “old french fort” mapped by James Mackay — and his frustrated admission that “I could See no traces of a Settlement of any Kind.” This is a captain’s concern: ground-truthing prior cartography. Clark also alone notes a botanical observation, identifying “a Kind of Grass resembling Timothey which appeared well calculated for Hay,” a remark consistent with Jefferson’s standing instructions to evaluate the country’s agricultural potential.
Gass’s interest in oar timber, mentioned only in passing, is in fact corroborated and expanded by Clark, who describes walking the south shore for the same purpose. This suggests Gass’s terse note reflects a shared task party rather than an independent observation — the sergeant recording his own assignment, the captain recording the assignment alongside everything else. Ordway, meanwhile, is the narrator most attentive to the crew’s collective exertion: his “obledged to waid & Toe the boat” preserves the labor that Clark renders more abstractly as “diffucult Dangerious.”
Register and Audience
The three entries also differ in implied audience. Clark writes as both navigator and reporter, recording bearings and distances (“N. 68°W. 21/2 ms.”) for eventual cartographic use, while also crafting narrative passages that close with sensory complaint: “the misquitoes and Ticks are noumerous & bad.” Ordway’s register sits between the official and the personal, foregrounding crew experience. Gass’s surviving fragment is the most workmanlike — a sergeant’s log stripped to essentials.
Read together, the June 16 entries demonstrate why the Lewis and Clark journals function best as a polyphonic record. No single narrator captures the day completely: Gass preserves the oar errand, Ordway the towing labor, Clark the hunters’ meat, the failed search for Mackay’s fort, the timothy-like grass, and the keelboat’s dangerous ascent through the middle of the stream. The sandbar that Ordway calls “verry bad” and Clark calls “the worst I had Seen” goes entirely unmentioned by Gass — a reminder that even shared hardships left uneven traces in the documentary record.
