The journal entries of August 29, 1806 offer an unusually clear demonstration of how three members of the Corps of Discovery could occupy the same stretch of the Missouri River and yet produce accounts of dramatically different scope, register, and observational ambition. Patrick Gass, John Ordway, and William Clark all record the same basic skeleton of the day — an early dispatch of hunters, a mid-morning departure, the passing of White River, buffalo hunting in the afternoon, and an evening encampment — but the texture of each narrative reveals the distinct sensibility of its author.
Enlisted Brevity: Gass and Ordway
Sergeant Gass produces the briefest entry of the three. His account is structured almost entirely around the party’s movements and small pleasures, beginning with the hunters going ahead and the remaining men passing time agreeably:
we amused ourselves till 10 o’clock gathering plumbs, of which there is great abundance at this place.
Gass notes the passage of White River, registers the navigational difficulty of the sand bars and shoals, and reports tersely that an attempted buffalo hunt about 2 o’clock was “unsuccessful.” His prose is functional and oriented to the soldier’s daily round.
Sergeant Ordway’s entry covers the same skeletal events but introduces details Gass omits entirely. Ordway records that the hunters did kill game in the afternoon — “we halted and killed Several buffaloe and deer” — directly contradicting Gass’s claim of an unsuccessful hunt, and suggesting Gass may have been writing only of the earlier attempt or of his own immediate party. More striking is Ordway’s domestic and commercial eye:
we Save all the buffaloe horns we can find to take to the States as they would make excelent k[n]ife and fork handles &C. &C.
This is the kind of practical, forward-looking detail Ordway frequently captures and that Gass tends to suppress. It anticipates the return to civilian life and the conversion of frontier abundance into manufactured goods — a register entirely absent from the other two narrators’ entries for this date.
Clark’s Expansive Survey
Captain Clark’s entry dwarfs both sergeants’ accounts in length and ambition. Where Gass gathers plums and Ordway counts horns, Clark coordinates hunting parties, dispatches men to investigate prairie dog towns (“the village of barking Squirels”), measures the width and depth of White River through Labiche and Willard’s wading reconnaissance, and notes the curious milky color of its waters. He tracks individual hunters by name — Drewyer, Labiche, Shannon, Willard, the Field brothers, Collins, Shields — and records the species and number of each kill with administrative precision.
The centerpiece of Clark’s entry, however, is a passage of natural-historical observation that has no parallel in either sergeant’s journal:
I assended to the high Country and from an eminance, I had a view of the plains for a great distance. from this eminance I had a view of a greater number of buffalow than I had ever Seen before at one time. I must have Seen near 20,000 of those animals feeding on this plain.
Clark immediately moves from the spectacle to an ethnographic and ecological inference:
I have observed that in the country between the nations which are at war with each other the greatest numbers of wild animals are to be found-
This is a hypothesis about the relationship between Indigenous warfare patterns and game distribution — essentially an argument that contested borderlands function as de facto game refuges. Neither Gass nor Ordway records the climb, the vista, the count, or the inference. Whether they were simply not present on the high ground or whether their journalistic register did not accommodate such reflections, the absence is telling.
Patterns of Omission and Register
The three entries together illustrate a recurring pattern in the expedition’s documentary record. The sergeants’ journals tend to compress the day into a sequence of movements and actions, with Ordway slightly more attentive than Gass to material culture and provisioning. Clark’s officer’s journal absorbs the same events but layers onto them administrative oversight, scientific measurement, and reflective generalization. Gass’s plum-gathering and Ordway’s knife-handle horns survive only because the sergeants chose to record what their captain did not — small human details that humanize the rapid descent of the Missouri and remind the reader that the famous twenty-thousand-buffalo vista was witnessed by men who had spent the morning eating fruit by the riverbank.
