On 10 September 1806, the homeward-bound Corps of Discovery encountered traders ascending the Missouri River below the Grand Nemaha. Both Captain William Clark and Sergeant John Ordway recorded the day’s events, but their entries diverge sharply in scope and emphasis — a useful case study in how rank, role, and audience shaped expedition journal-keeping.
Two Encounters or One?
Clark documents two separate meetings with traders. The first is with “a Mr. Alexander La fass and three french men from St. Louis in a Small perogue on his way to the River Platt to trade with the Pania Luup or Wolf Indians.” Clark names the trader, identifies his crew size, his vessel, his destination, and even the specific Pawnee band he intends to visit. A second meeting follows: “a large perogue and 7 Men from St. Louis bound to the Mahars for the purpose of trade, this perogue was in Charge of a Mt. La Craw.”
Ordway, by contrast, compresses the day’s traffic into a single sentence: “about 3 P. M. we met four frenchmen with a canoe loaded with goods going up trading, they gave us a dram we then procd on.” The sergeant records neither name, nor destination, nor the second perogue at all. Whether Ordway conflated the two encounters, missed the second entirely from his position in the line of canoes, or simply judged it not worth noting, his entry illustrates how non-command narrators often filtered the day through immediate sensory experience rather than strategic intelligence.
Intelligence Versus Incident
Clark’s entry functions as military and commercial intelligence. From La fass he extracts news of momentous developments back in the United States:
Mr. la frost informed us that Genl. Wilkinson and all the troops had decended the Mississippi and Mr. Pike and young Mr. Wilkinson had Set out on an expedition up the Arkansaw river or in that direction
This is the first the captains have heard of Zebulon Pike’s southwestern expedition — significant news for officers who had been beyond the reach of Atlantic dispatches for over two years. Clark also notes the inconsistency in the trader’s name (“La fass,” then “la frost”), a transcription wobble preserved in the manuscript. Ordway records none of this geopolitical content. For him the encounter is reducible to its most tangible product: the dram of whiskey.
That dram, indeed, is the one detail both men preserve, though Clark elaborates: “he offered us any thing he had, we axcepted of a bottle of whisky only which we gave to our party.” Editorial annotation in the published Ordway transcript notes this was the first spirituous liquor tasted by any of the party since July 4, 1805 — a fact that explains why Ordway, writing for himself rather than for Jefferson, foregrounded it.
The River Itself
Clark devotes considerable attention to navigation hazards, describing a passage “Crouded with Snags & Sawyers” and observing that “we find the river in this timbered Country narrow and more moveing Sands and a much greater quantity of Sawyers or Snags than above.” He closes with a precise reckoning: “we made 65 Miles to day.” This is the captain’s characteristic blend of hydrographic observation and mileage accounting, prepared for eventual cartographic and official use.
Ordway omits river conditions and distance entirely. His attention rests on game — the raccoon killed by a hunter, the turkeys sighted — and on the human encounter. Where Clark closes by noting “one of the men killed a racoon which the indians very much admired,” referring to the Native delegations traveling with the Corps, Ordway simply records the kill without the ethnographic detail of indigenous reaction.
Patterns of Authorship
The 10 September entries reinforce a pattern visible throughout the return voyage: Clark writes with the discipline of an officer compiling a record for governmental review, naming individuals, recording political intelligence, logging mileage, and assessing the river as a future commercial highway. Ordway writes shorter, less specific entries oriented around the rhythm of the day’s hunting and the small pleasures — like a shared dram — that punctuated weeks of paddling. Neither narrator appears to have copied from the other on this date; their independent accounts, read together, recover a fuller picture than either provides alone.
