The entries of Patrick Gass, John Ordway, and William Clark for August 23, 1806, describe the same sequence of events on the lower Missouri: an early start, rising wind that forced a halt, hunters dispatched ahead, elk and deer brought in, a sudden shower, and a mosquito-plagued encampment. Read together, the three accounts illustrate how closely the enlisted journalists tracked the captain’s narrative skeleton — and how dramatically Clark’s entry expands beyond it.
A Shared Skeleton
The structural overlap among the three narrators is striking. Gass writes that the party went on well
till near noon, when the wind blew so hard that we had to halt, and were detained about four hours.
Ordway records nearly the same fact, though he places the delay at three hours: the wind
rose So high that it detained us about 3 hours.
Clark, more precise, gives both endpoints: the wind became too high at half past eleven, and the party remained ashore until 3 p.m. The two enlisted journalists round Clark’s interval in opposite directions — Gass upward to four hours, Ordway downward to three — a small but telling indication that neither was simply copying the other or the captain verbatim. Each apparently drafted from memory or rough notes, anchoring on the same shared events.
The hunting episode shows the same pattern. Gass and Ordway report the kill in a single sentence apiece; Clark names the hunters — Shields and the Field brothers — and specifies that the deer were poor and the elk not fat, so only the fleece was taken. Where Gass notes simply that the men "halted to take in the meat," Clark documents the dispatch and rendezvous as a deliberate operational decision.
What Only Clark Sees
Two passages in Clark’s entry have no parallel in either Gass or Ordway. The first is botanical. Clark observes
great quantities of Grapes and Choke Cheries, also a Speces of Currunt which I had never before observed the leas is larger than those above, the Currt. black and very inferior to either the yellow, red, or perpleat dark
This habit of comparative natural-history observation — ranking the new black currant against the yellow, red, and purple varieties already catalogued upriver — is entirely absent from the Gass and Ordway entries, which mention no plants at all. It is a register difference as much as a content difference: Clark is writing, in part, for a scientific audience.
The second unique passage is medical. Clark closes with a line that neither enlisted journalist records:
My Frend Capt Lewis is recoverig fast the hole in his thy where the Ball passed out is Closed and appears to be nearly well. the one where the ball entered discharges very well-.
Lewis had been accidentally shot by Pierre Cruzatte on August 11, and Clark, acting as his physician, tracks the wound’s progress with clinical attention to the entrance and exit holes. That Gass and Ordway omit this entirely is itself revealing: Lewis’s condition was apparently no longer alarming enough to require comment from the ranks, but it remained the central concern of his co-commander.
Mosquitoes and Mileage
All three narrators end the day with the mosquitoes. Gass calls them "very troublesonte"; Clark calls them "large and very troublesom" but adds that he had deliberately chosen a sandbar under a bluff to escape them, and that the strategy worked — "they were not very troublesom after we landed." Ordway, characteristically terse, does not mention them. Only Clark gives the day’s distance: forty miles, well below the seventy-to-eighty-mile pace the descending party had been making.
The composite picture is of a frustrating, weather-broken day on which the party covered little ground but secured meat and observed familiar landmarks. The three entries agree on the day’s essentials and diverge in exactly the ways one would expect: Gass narrating in plain summary, Ordway compressing to a logbook minimum, and Clark layering operational detail, natural history, and medical observation onto the shared frame.
