The expedition’s struggle up the Missouri on April 20, 1805, generated four overlapping accounts that, read together, reveal how dramatically the narrators differed in attention, register, and interest. All four men recorded the same basic facts: a 7 a.m. start, fierce headwinds, canoes shipping water, a forced early camp, successful hunting, and the discovery of an abandoned Indian burial. But what each chose to dwell on — and what each omitted — exposes the distinct sensibilities of the captains, the sergeant, and the carpenter-sergeant.
The Captains’ Divided Labor
Lewis and Clark literally split the day between them: Lewis walked the north bank while Clark managed the flotilla. Their journals reflect that division. Clark’s entry is dominated by the river itself — the collapsing bank that nearly swamped a canoe, the perilous rounding of the first point, and the running tally of game and beaver. He writes plainly of the danger:
the wind became hard and waves So rought that we proceeded with our little Canoes with much risque, our Situation was Such after Setting out that we were obliged to pass round the 1st Point or lay exposed to the blustering winds & waves
Lewis, walking ashore, produces the day’s most expansive prose. Where Clark gives a single sentence to the scaffolded woman, Lewis devotes a long ethnographic passage to the same scene, cataloguing its contents and reasoning about its meaning:
underneath this scaffold a human body was lying, well rolled in several dressed buffaloe skins and near it a bag of the same materials containg sundry articles belonging to the disceased; consisting of a pare of mockersons, some red and blue earth, beaver’s nails, instruments for dressing the Buffalo skin, some dryed roots, several platts of the sweet grass, and a small quantity of Mandan tobacco.
Lewis goes further, generalizing the practice across the “Assinniboins, Mandans, Minetares” and speculating — with a touch of pathos — about the dog whose carcass lay nearby, killed as “the reward, which the poor doog had met with for performing the ____-friendly office to his mistres of transporting her corps.” Clark, by contrast, simply notes that “her dog was killed and lay near her,” and adds one detail Lewis omits entirely: a blue jay among the grave goods. The captains were clearly comparing notes — the inventories overlap heavily — but each preserved observations the other missed.
Ordway’s Sensory Detail and Gass’s Compression
Sergeant Ordway, writing from the water, captures the day’s physical texture with a vividness neither captain matches. His description of the sandstorm is unique to his journal:
the Sand blew off the Sand bars & beaches So that we could hardly See, it was like a thick fogg.
Ordway also gives the day’s most concrete measure of the wind’s power — “it took us about two hours to come about 1 miles” — and registers a personal grievance the officers do not: “the water came up to my Box So that a part of my paper Got wet.” He is the only narrator to mention Lewis pausing at an old Indian camp to make fire and eat the deer’s liver, and the only one to itemize the “little notions” found hanging at their evening camp: “a Scraper a paint bag… kinikaneck bags, flints &C.” Notably, Ordway records no encounter with the scaffolded burial — confirming that this was Lewis’s discovery on his solitary walk, communicated to Clark in camp but evidently not to the men in the canoes.
Patrick Gass’s entry is, as so often, a model of compression. The entire day collapses into three sentences noting the wind, the six miles made, the drying of the loading, and the killing of “three elk” — plus one detail no other narrator records:
got a number of Geese eggs out of their nests, which are generally built on trees.
That observation about tree-nesting geese is characteristic of Gass: terse, practical, and occasionally preserving a natural-history note that the more voluble journalists let slip past. Where Lewis sees ritual and Ordway sees suffering, Gass sees eggs.
Patterns of Influence and Independence
The hunting tallies show the expected pattern of cross-pollination between the captains: Clark’s “3 Elk 4 Gees & 2 Deer” matches Lewis’s “3 Elk 4 gees and 2 deer” almost word for word, suggesting the figures were reconciled in camp. Yet the two captains’ accounts of the burial diverge enough — different details, different emphases — to indicate they wrote independently from a shared conversation rather than one copying the other. Ordway and Gass, meanwhile, show no sign of borrowing from the captains or from each other; their entries reflect what each man saw from his own position in the boats. The result is a layered record in which the wind, the river, and a fallen scaffold each come into focus differently depending on who is holding the pen.
