The August 9, 1806 entries capture the Corps of Discovery still bisected, with Captain Lewis encamped upriver mending clothes and waiting, and Captain Clark’s party drifting down the Missouri toward an eventual reunion. Four narrators write the day, and the resulting record offers a clear demonstration of how rank, position, and temperament shaped what each man chose to set down.
The Enlisted Shorthand: Gass and Ordway
Sergeants Patrick Gass and John Ordway, both stationed with Lewis, produce nearly interchangeable miniature entries. Gass writes simply that the men "were employed as yesterday; and in making small oars for our canoes," noting that "Two of them went over the river and killed an elk and a deer." Ordway covers the same ground with marginally more specificity:
dressing our deer Skins the 2 fields went across the river a hunt-ing returnd towards evening had killed 1 Elk and one deer, all hands employed makeing themselves comfortable.
Ordway names the Field brothers; Gass does not. Ordway specifies the labor as dressing skins; Gass folds it into "employed as yesterday." Neither sergeant mentions what Lewis confides in his own entry — that Colter and Collins remain unaccounted for, and that the captain fears "some missfortune has happened them." The sergeants’ silence on this point is consistent with their general practice of recording the camp’s collective routine rather than the captain’s anxieties.
Lewis’s Worry, Clark’s Plenty
Lewis’s entry (misdated "Saturday August 9th," though the day was Monday) is brief but freighted with concern. He has dispatched Reubin and Joseph Field across the river with orders "to proceed to the entrance of the White earth river in surch of Capt. C." Their return brings no news: "they saw no appearance of Capt. Clark or party. they found no game nor was there a buffaloe.to be seen in the plains as far as the eye could reach." Lewis closes with practical frustration — the pirogue is still too wet to repair, and "we have no pitch and will therefore be compelled to use coal and tallow."
Clark, downriver and unaware of Lewis’s anxious vigil, writes the day’s longest and most varied entry. He moves from the morning’s loading of canoes, to a rendezvous with hunters Shields and Gibson, to a ten-mile overland walk across an open bottom, to a botanical observation, to a dramatic evening kill. His prose is the most attentive to landscape and ethnobotany of any narrator on this date:
The Squar brought me a large and well flavoured Goose berry of a rich Crimsin Colour, and deep purple berry of the large Cherry of the Current Speces which is common on this river as low as the Mandans, the engagees Call it the Indian Current.
The reference is to Sacagawea, whose contributions of plant knowledge appear repeatedly in Clark’s homeward record. Clark also notes the timber composition of the creek bottom — "Cottonwood, ash & Elm" — a level of botanical inventory absent from the entries of Gass and Ordway.
The Hunter’s Calculus and the Day’s Trophy
Clark’s hunting entry reveals a logistical reasoning his subordinates rarely articulate. Walking the bottom, he encounters elk but declines to fire:
I killed 3 of the deer which were Meagure the Elk appeared fat. I did not kill any of them as the distance to the river was too great for the men to Carry the meat
The decision belongs to a captain weighing labor against yield. Later, on the southeast side, Clark kills what he calls "the largest Buck I ever Saw and the fattest animal which have been killed on the rout" — a superlative that, if it had occurred in Lewis’s camp, might never have reached the page through Gass’s or Ordway’s compressed prose.
Read together, the four entries triangulate a single day across roughly a hundred river miles of separation. Lewis worries about missing men and missing pitch; Clark celebrates fat elk and crimson berries; the sergeants record oars, skins, and a brace of game. The collation underscores how thoroughly the expedition’s documentary record depends on which narrator held which position in the divided command.
This analysis was AI-assisted and reviewed by a human editor.
