The entries for 23 June 1804 record a single shared event — a wind-bound day on a Missouri River island during which Captain Clark, having gone ashore to hunt, failed to rejoin the party and was forced to camp alone. Yet the three surviving accounts differ so sharply in length, register, and detail that they offer a useful case study in how the expedition’s narrators allocated attention.
Compression and Expansion
Sergeant Gass disposes of the day in a single sentence:
the wind blew so strong down the river that we were unable to proceed, and we encamped on an island and inspected the arms and ammunition. — Captain Clarke went out with one of the men and did not return this evening.
Gass’s entry, as is typical of his journal in this stretch, functions almost as a logbook: weather, halt, routine task, anomaly. Floyd’s entry covers the same four facts in nearly the same order — wind from the N.W., the 5 (or 7) o’clock departure, the inspection of arms, Clark’s absence — but adds the hunting tally:
armes and amunition enspcted all in Good order Cap‘ Clark went hunting Did not Return Last night but [he] Returnd erley in the morning Killed one Deer ouer ‘ Hunter Killed one Bear 4 Deer.
The close parallelism between Gass and Floyd here — same sequence of clauses, same selection of facts — is consistent with the broader pattern in the early journals in which the two sergeants’ entries cluster tightly, sharing a sergeant’s-eye view of camp routine. Floyd, however, consistently appends the day’s game count, a detail Gass omits.
Clark’s Two Drafts
Clark himself supplies two versions. The terse field notes record only the courses, the six-mile walk through a “rich bottom,” a deer killed, and the river’s eight-inch fall. The expanded entry, by contrast, is one of the most personal passages in the early journals. Clark explains the misjudgment that stranded him — he “expected the party on Shore would overtake me at the head of the Island” — and then narrates the improvised bivouac:
I concluded to Camp, Peeled Some bark to lay on, and geathered wood to make fires to Keep off the musquitor & Knats.
The continuation, written under the 24 June heading, is more vivid still. Crossing from an island to a willow bar, Clark
got mired, and was obliged to Craul oat, a disegreeable Situation & a Diverting one of any one who Could have Seen me after I got out, all Covered with mud
The self-deprecating aside — imagining how he must have looked — is a register almost wholly absent from Gass and Floyd. So is the snake episode that follows, in which a snake repeatedly strikes at meat hung near the water and, Clark observes, seems drawn specifically to the portion containing “the milk of a Doe.” Clark kills it. None of this reaches the sergeants’ pages.
What Each Narrator Notices
Read together, the three accounts illustrate a consistent division of labor. Gass records the collective fact: the party was wind-bound and inspected arms. Floyd records the collective fact plus the hunters’ returns, the kind of quantitative summary a sergeant of the guard would naturally keep. Clark, writing both as commander and as the day’s protagonist, supplies the interior narrative — the miscalculation, the bark bedding, the mud, the thirst (“we feasted of meet & water… being much fatigued & thirsty”), the snake, and the natural-historical aside on bears feeding on mulberries.
One small attribution to note: Gass writes that the party “inspected” the arms, while Clark specifies that “Cap. Lewis had the arms examined.” Since Lewis kept no journal entry for this date, Clark’s note is the only contemporary indication of which captain supervised the inspection while the other was ashore. It is precisely the kind of command detail that the sergeants, generalizing toward “we,” tend to elide.
The 23 June entries thus form a useful triangulation: Gass for the bare schedule, Floyd for the day’s tally, and Clark for everything that happened off the boat — including the only Missouri River episode in this week’s record in which a captain spends a night alone in the woods, mired to the knees and fending off a snake from his supper.
