The journal entries of September 5, 1806, capture the Corps of Discovery making rapid progress down the Missouri River, having recently met the trader James Aird and now passing familiar ground from their 1804 ascent. Three narrators — Captain William Clark, Sergeant John Ordway, and Sergeant Patrick Gass — record the day, and their accounts together illuminate the layered nature of the expedition’s documentary record.
A Shared Refrain: The Mosquitoes
All three narrators frame the day around the torment of mosquitoes, but with notable differences in emphasis and explanation. Clark opens his entry with a striking causal statement:
The Musquetors being So excessively tormenting that the party was all on board and we Set out at day light and proceeded on very well.
For Clark, the insects are the explicit reason the party broke camp at dawn. Ordway echoes the complaint, noting the men were kept "light by the Musquetoes" — a phrasing that suggests sleeplessness — and explains the choice of evening camp in similar terms, writing that they camped "on a Sand beach to git as much out of the Musquetoes as possable." Gass, characteristically the most economical of the three, compresses the entire matter into a single closing clause:
we encamped on a sand bar, where the musquitoes were very troublesome.
The pattern across these three entries is consistent with what scholars have long observed: Gass tends to telegraph the day’s essentials, Ordway provides middle-register reporting with practical reasoning, and Clark elaborates with command-level context. The shared logic of camping on a sand bar — where river breezes thin the insect clouds — is articulated most fully by Ordway, made implicit by Clark, and merely noted by Gass.
Mileage, Geography, and Command Knowledge
The three narrators differ slightly on the day’s distance. Ordway records "75 miles this day," while Clark logs 73. Such two-mile discrepancies between the captain’s official reckoning and the sergeants’ records appear throughout the journals and likely reflect independent estimation rather than deliberate revision. Gass, on this date, gives no mileage at all.
Clark’s entry stands apart for its dense geographical and ethnographic content. He alone names the "blue Stone bluff," passed at 3 P.M., and observes the transition where "the river leaves the high lands and meanders through a low rich bottom." He alone offers a hydrographic assessment, noting that the river "becoms much narrower more Crooked and the Current more rapid and Crouded with Snags or Sawyers than it is above." And he alone reasons through the absence of the trader McClellan and the meaning of distant gunfire:
the report of the guns which was heard must have been the Mahars who most probably have just arrived at their village from hunting the buffalow. this is a Season they usialy return to their village to Secure their Crops of Corn Beens punkins &c &c.
This passage demonstrates Clark’s characteristic interpretive habit: hearing a sound, reasoning to its likely source, and contextualizing it within his accumulated knowledge of Omaha (Maha) seasonal rounds. Neither Ordway nor Gass mentions the gunfire or McClellan at all — a reminder that the sergeants often did not share, or did not record, the captains’ broader strategic awareness.
What Only Clark Records
Two further details appear only in Clark’s entry. First, he notes the camp’s position "a little below our Encampment of the 9th of August 1804" — a backward reference to the outbound voyage that demonstrates the captains’ active use of their own earlier journals as navigational aids. Second, Clark alone records the health of his co-commander:
Capt. Lewis still in a Convelesent State.
Lewis was recovering from the gunshot wound accidentally inflicted by Pierre Cruzatte on August 11, and the silence of Ordway and Gass on this matter is itself revealing. Clark closes with a brief game inventory — "pelicans Geese ducks, Eagles and Hawks" — none worth killing, a small detail that nonetheless documents the changing fauna as the party descended toward more settled country.
Read together, the three entries for September 5, 1806, illustrate how the expedition’s documentary completeness depends on layering. Gass marks the bare facts; Ordway adds practical reasoning; Clark supplies the geographic, ethnographic, and command-level context that makes the day legible as part of a larger narrative.
