The expedition’s April 23, 1805 entries offer an unusually clear case study in how four men, sharing the same river bend and the same lost hours, distributed their attention across very different registers. The day’s central event was simple: a violent northwest wind pinned the boats for roughly three hours, soaked some cargo, and pushed the party only fourteen or fifteen miles before they encamped on the north (starboard) side of the Missouri. What changes from journal to journal is not the fact of the delay but its meaning.
Captains’ Frustration vs. Sergeants’ Sequence
Both captains close their entries with nearly identical complaints about the wind as a structural problem for the expedition. Lewis writes:
these hard winds, being so frequently repeated, become a serious source of detention to us.
Clark, in his characteristically looser orthography, expands the same thought into a fuller meditation:
The winds of this Countrey which blow with Some violence almost every day, has become a Serious obstruction in our progression onward, as we Cant move when the wind is high without great risque, and if there was no risque the winds is generally a head and often too violent to proceed
The parallel phrasing — Lewis’s “serious source of detention,” Clark’s “Serious obstruction” — suggests the two commanders had discussed the problem in those terms before committing it to paper. Neither sergeant uses such language. Gass compresses the entire day into three terse sentences, recording only the wind delay, the mileage, and Clark’s game. Ordway, by contrast, produces the day’s longest narrative of small events: two beaver caught overnight, a beaver shot in the willows, a goose shot in the river, the large pirogues sailing fast in a favorable bend before the wind turned dangerous, the small canoes shipping water, the wet articles laid out to dry. Ordway sees the day as a sequence; the captains see it as a problem.
Clark’s Ramble, Seen Four Ways
The day’s other shared event is Clark’s hunting walk, which produced three black-tailed (mule) deer and a buffalo calf. Each narrator handles it differently. Gass reports it as bare fact: “Captain Clarke killed 3 blacktailed deer and a buffaloe calf.” Ordway echoes the same tally almost verbatim — “Cap.t Clark killed to day one buffaloe Calf, and three black taild deer” — confirming the pattern, frequently visible elsewhere in the journals, of the sergeants cross-checking or sharing game counts at day’s end.
Lewis, who was managing the wind-bound boats, narrates Clark’s return from his own vantage:
shortly after we were joined by Capt. Clark who had walked on shore this morning, and passing through the bottom lands had fallen on the river some miles above, and concluding that the wind had detained us, came down the river in surch of us.
Clark’s own version of the same reunion is told from the walker’s side, with attention to the country he crossed:
I walked on Shore after brackfast in my walk on the S side passed through extensive bottoms of timber intersperced with glades & low open plains… I Struck the river above the Perogus which had Come too in a bend to the L. S. to Shelter from the wind
Read together, the two captains’ accounts triangulate the morning: Clark walks ahead through the bottoms, the wind rises around 9 a.m., the boats take shelter, Clark realizes from upstream that they must be detained, and walks back down to find them. Neither sergeant captures this small drama of inference and reunion.
Detail Distribution and Register
A few details appear in only one journal. Only Ordway records the beaver and goose taken by unnamed men, and only Ordway notes that wet cargo was dried during the layover — though Lewis confirms the wetting (“some of the canoes shiped water, and wet several parsels of their lading, which I directed to be opened and aired”). Only Clark calls the morning “cold” and characterizes the buffalo calf as “verry fine” and the deer as “in tolerable order,” assessments tied to his role as the expedition’s principal hunter-evaluator. Only Lewis emphasizes the absence of timber as the reason sheltering was difficult: “there being no timber on either side of the river at this place.”
The mileage figures diverge slightly — Gass gives 15 miles, Ordway 14½ — a typical small discrepancy between sergeants’ independent reckonings. Taken as a whole, the four entries demonstrate the documentary value of the expedition’s redundant journal-keeping system: the captains supply analysis and command perspective, while Gass and Ordway preserve the granular texture of camp life that the captains, preoccupied with strategy and weather, frequently let pass without comment.
