The expedition’s first sustained encampment on the lower Missouri — what Clark names White Catfish Camp, ten miles above the Platte — produces an unusually clean test of how each narrator’s habits shape the record. Every man present is writing about the same handful of events: a diplomatic errand sent west toward the Otoe and Pawnee, a flagstaff raised, provisions aired, hunters dispatched, deer killed. What differs is scale, emphasis, and the small details each writer alone preserves.
One Errand, Five Versions
Clark’s two parallel entries dwarf the others, and they alone explain the reasoning behind the Otoe mission. He notes that Drouillard and Cruzatte carried tobacco — a diplomatic detail no one else records — and that the Pawnee village lay roughly thirty miles farther up, on the south side of the Platte. He also reasons aloud about why the villages might be empty:
at this Season of the year all the Indians in this quater are in the Plains hunting the Buffalow from Some Signs Seen by our hunter and the Praries being on fire in the derection of the Village induce a belief that the Nation have returned to get green Corn
This is Clark thinking on the page — reading prairie smoke as a calendar marker, hedging his guess against the seasonal round. None of the other narrators attempt the inference. Ordway and Whitehouse simply state the errand and the distance (forty-five miles, against Clark’s eighteen to the Otoe town and thirty more to the Pawnee — the discrepancy itself worth noting). Floyd reduces the entire day to a single sentence and signs off with his characteristic nothing worth Relating to day
.
The Ordway–Whitehouse Echo
The well-documented pattern of Whitehouse copying Ordway is again on display. Compare Ordway’s we hoisted the American Collours on the Bank the loading of the Boat put out to air
with Whitehouse’s we hoisted the american Collours on the Bank.
Both give the latitude in identical form — 41d 3m 19s North
in Ordway, 41^ 3″ 19^^ North
in Whitehouse — and both report a single hunter killing two deer. Clark, by contrast, records five deer killed across multiple parties. The Ordway–Whitehouse pair appear to be working from the same partial summary, while Clark is tallying the camp’s full output.
Gass, writing retrospectively and compressing the entire stay from the 23rd through the 27th into one passage, is the only narrator to extend the record forward: he reports that the two messengers returned from the Indian village, without finding any of the natives
— confirming Clark’s hunch about the seasonal hunt — and that the party resumed travel on the 27th with a fair wind, making twelve miles. Gass’s compression sacrifices day-by-day texture but supplies the outcome the contemporaneous journals cannot.
Small Details Held by Single Narrators
Several observations survive in only one journal. Clark alone mentions that he began copying his map of the river below to send to the Presdt. of U S.
by a returning party of soldiers — a significant administrative act preserved nowhere else. Clark alone notes the man with a bad riseing on his left breast
(rendered in his second draft as a turner on his breast
), the expedition’s first recorded medical complaint of the stop. Gass alone reports beaver — two beaver. Beaver appear plenty in this part of the country
— a faunal observation the others omit entirely. Floyd, terse as ever, is nonetheless the only narrator to identify Cruzatte by role rather than name: ouer Bowsman wo is aquainted with the nations.
Read together, the five entries demonstrate how thoroughly the expedition’s documentary record depended on Clark. Strip his journal away and the day becomes a flag, a latitude, two deer, and an unnamed errand of unspecified purpose. Add him back and the camp acquires a map being drafted for Jefferson, a sick man, a reasoned theory of where the Otoe had gone, and the tobacco that was meant to bring them back.
