The expedition’s second full day above Fort Mandan offers an unusually clear case study in how four men, traveling together and witnessing the same events, distribute their attention across very different registers. All four narrators agree on the basic frame: an early start, a deer killed in the morning, two geese taken, a distant party of Indians sighted on the opposite shore, and a camp made after about twenty-one miles. Beyond that shared skeleton, each journal pursues its own preoccupations.
Four Registers of the Same Day
Patrick Gass compresses the entire day into three sentences. He notes the pleasant weather, the unspoken-to Indians on the south side, the distance, and the north-bank camp. His entry is essentially a logbook abstract — the sort of skeletal record that confirms the day’s outline without elaborating it.
John Ordway, by contrast, is the day’s fullest chronicler of camp life. He alone records the trap set the night before:
light, one of the party caught a beaver in a trap which he Set last night, the frenchmen killed a Goos & caught one beaver
Ordway also captures a vivid sensory detail no other narrator preserves — the warmth of the day and its effect on the men:
the day verry warm. Some of the men worked naked, only a breech cloth, the River being low we have to waid at Some places
This is precisely the kind of laboring-body observation that Lewis and Clark, writing as commanders, tend to omit. Ordway also identifies the distant Indians more confidently than his captains, supposing them to be “the Grossvauntars who had been up the River to Some other nation after corn” — a guess Clark independently confirms.
Lewis the Naturalist, Clark the Geologist
Lewis devotes the bulk of his entry to two themes: the recovery of stores damaged in the canoe accident of April 8th, and natural history. He notes with evident relief that the wet powder “appears to be almost restored, and our loss is therefore not so great as we had at first apprehended.” He pauses over a saline efflorescence on the banks:
there is a white substance that appears in considerable quantities on the surface of the earth, which tastes like a mixture of common salt and glauber salts
He also identifies the white cranes — almost certainly whooping cranes — with characteristic precision: “perfectly white except the large feathers of the two first joints of the wing which are black.”
Clark, walking on shore, sees a different country. Where Lewis tastes the soil, Clark reads the hills. He notes bear tracks Lewis does not mention, catalogues the waterfowl (“great numbers of Gees Brant & Mallard Some White Cranes Swan & guls”), and turns a geologist’s eye on the bluffs:
the hills on either side are from 5 to 7 miles asunder and in maney places have been burnt, appearing at a distance of a redish brown choler, containing Pumic Stone & lava
His description of the bituminous strata — coal that “resists the fire for Some time, and consumes without emiting much flaim” — is the day’s most sustained piece of field observation, and it has no counterpart in Lewis’s entry.
Cross-Narrator Patterns
The four entries do not appear to copy one another on this date. Gass and Ordway both give the distance as twenty-one miles, but their phrasing differs, and Gass lacks Ordway’s circumstantial detail. Lewis and Clark, though traveling apart for much of the day, converge in identifying the distant Indians as Minetares (Hidatsa), with Clark supplying the additional context that they were “a part of the Menetarras who camped a little above this with the Ossinniboins at the mouth of the little Missouri all the latter part of the winter.” Ordway’s independent identification of them as Gros Ventres going down with corn supplements rather than echoes the captains.
Each narrator also notices something the others miss. Only Clark records the bear tracks and the burnt, lava-strewn hills. Only Lewis describes the saline crust and the plumage of the cranes. Only Ordway preserves the image of men wading the shallows in breechclouts, and only Ordway specifies that the dinner of “venison stake and beavers tales” — which Lewis frames as a welcome meal after days without fresh meat — followed a morning in which the Frenchmen ahead of the party were already taking beaver. Gass, finally, reminds the reader how much detail a working soldier might consider unnecessary to record at all.
