The October 17, 1804 entries from William Clark, John Ordway, and Patrick Gass align on the day’s basic shape: a clear morning, an Arikara visit settled with gifts, a north-westerly wind that pinned the boat by mid-morning, and six deer brought in by hunters. Yet the three accounts diverge sharply in register, detail, and curiosity, offering a useful case study in how rank and role shaped what each man thought worth preserving.
A Shared Skeleton, Three Different Bodies
Ordway and Gass clearly share a sergeant’s-eye economy. Both open with the previous night’s Indian visitors and the morning’s exchange of presents, both fix the halt at roughly half past ten, and both close with the deer count. Gass is the most compressed:
At half past ten the wind blew so hard down the river that we were obliged to halt. At four we proceeded on with the assistance of the tow line… Several hunters went out this day and killed six deer: one of them did not join us at night.
Ordway expands the same skeleton with sensory texture — “the moon Shined pleasant” — and a small social note absent from Gass: the Arikara visitors “Sang the most of the night.” Where Gass credits “Captain Lewis” with distributing presents, Ordway writes more diffusely of “our officers,” a small but telling difference in how each sergeant tracked command. Ordway also specifies that it was Clark who went hunting on the south side, a detail Gass omits entirely.
Clark’s Wider Frame
Clark’s two drafts of the day operate on a different plane. Free to walk ashore with the Arikara chief and the interpreter Joseph Gravelines, he gathers ethnographic and natural-historical material that neither sergeant had access to. His central contribution is the antelope migration:
we observe emence herds of Goats, or Antelopes flocking down from the N E Side & Swiming the River, the Chief tels me those animals winter in the Black Mountain, and in the fall return to those mounts from every quarter, and in the Spring disperse in the planes
This is one of the expedition’s earliest recorded observations of pronghorn seasonal movement, and it survives only because Clark was on shore with an informant. Ordway and Gass, confined to the wind-bound boat, record neither the herds nor the explanation. Clark’s field-book and journal versions of the entry agree closely on the migration but differ in tone toward the chief’s other lore: the rougher field note dismisses “maney extroadenary Stories,” while the fair-copy entry is more specific — “Treditions about Turtles, Snakes, &. and the power of a perticiler rock or Cave” — before judging “none of those I think worth while mentioning.” The selective filter is itself revealing: Clark accepts the chief’s natural history and rejects what he reads as the supernatural, a sorting Ordway and Gass never had to perform.
What Only One Man Sees
Two further details appear in Clark alone. He records the latitude observation — “Latd 46° 23′ 57″ N” — taken, his fair copy clarifies, by Lewis during the wind-stop, a reminder that Lewis kept no journal entry for this day and that Clark functions here as the expedition’s scientific recorder by default. And he notes a small ornithological capture:
I caught a Small uncommon whiperwill
Neither sergeant mentions the bird. The deer count itself shifts between narrators in instructive ways: Gass and Ordway both report six deer total; Clark’s field note tallies “3 Dear & a Elk” for himself plus four by the hunters and one by the chief, while his journal version revises to three and three with the chief’s deer lost. The discrepancies are minor, but they show Clark revising in private while the sergeants’ counts — likely drawn from the evening’s camp talk — settle on a cleaner public number.
Taken together, the three entries demonstrate the expedition’s documentary division of labor on an ordinary wind-bound day: Gass providing the terse logistical spine, Ordway adding atmosphere and small social observations, and Clark — by virtue of being ashore with an Indigenous informant — carrying the day’s ethnography, natural history, and astronomy almost single-handedly.
