On April 24, 1805, the Corps of Discovery lay wind-bound on the Missouri River as they approached the Yellowstone confluence. Four narrators — Meriwether Lewis, William Clark, Patrick Gass, and John Ordway — each set down an account of the day. Read side by side, the entries reveal a familiar pattern of overlapping observation and divergent emphasis, and they offer a particularly clear example of how Lewis and Clark coordinated their journals while the enlisted men, Gass and Ordway, worked from a different vantage.
Shared Facts, Shared Phrasing
The factual core of the day is consistent across all four journals: a violent northwest wind kept the party in camp, hunters were sent out, deer and elk were killed, and someone returned with a litter of young wolves. Lewis and Clark, however, share more than facts — they share language. Lewis writes that hunters “killed 4 deer & 2 Elk, and caught some young wolves of the small kind,” while Clark records that they “killed 4 Deer 2 Elk & cought Some young wolves of the Small kind.” The near-identical phrasing, including the specific tally and the qualifier “of the small kind,” reflects the captains’ established practice of comparing notes at the end of the day.
The sand complaint is similarly twinned. Clark observes:
The party complain much of the Sand in their eyes, the Sand is verry fine and rises in clouds from the Points and bars of the river, I may Say that dureing those winds we eat Drink & breeth a prepotion of Sand.
Lewis develops the same observation at considerably greater length, but the conceptual scaffolding — sore eyes, fine sand lifted from the bars, the party forced to “eat, drink, and breath it” — is the same. Whether Clark condensed Lewis or Lewis expanded Clark on this date is debatable, but the parallel is unmistakable.
Lewis the Naturalist, Lewis the Owner of a Pocket Watch
What distinguishes Lewis’s entry is his characteristic move from collective experience to particular detail. After describing the airborne sand, he extends the observation into a small natural-history vignette: the sand at a distance exhibits “every appearance of a collumn of thick smoke.” He then narrows further, to a single object in his own pocket:
my pocket watch, is out of order, she will run only a few minutes without stoping. I can discover no radical defect in her works, and must therefore attribute it to the sand, with which, she seems plentifully charged, notwithstanding her cases are double and tight.
No other narrator mentions the watch. The passage is typical of Lewis’s register — diagnostic, slightly fussy, willing to dwell on a private inconvenience as scientific evidence. Clark, by contrast, generalizes to “the party,” Gass to “the men,” and Ordway to camp activity. Only Lewis turns the day’s discomfort into an instrument case.
Gass and Ordway: The View from the Ranks
Sergeants Gass and Ordway record the day in the plainer, more episodic style that distinguishes their journals from the captains’. Gass omits the wind-sand complaint entirely and instead reports a small reconnaissance the officers do not mention:
some of the men went to see some water at a distance which appeared like a river or small lake. In the afternoon they returned, and had found it only the water of the Missouri, which had run up a bottom.
This is the kind of small-party errand that rarely surfaces in Lewis’s or Clark’s entries, and it is a useful reminder that the enlisted journalists often preserve incidents the captains compressed away. Gass also gives a higher wolf count — “six young wolves” — where Lewis and Clark write only “some.”
Ordway, characteristically attentive to camp logistics, is the only narrator to mention that the party “dryed and aired Some of the loading which had got wet yesterday,” connecting this day’s delay to the previous day’s troubles. He also notes, almost in passing, that “the wods got on fire” — a detail entirely absent from the other three journals. Like Gass’s phantom lake, the woods fire is the sort of incident that survives only because a sergeant thought to write it down.
Patterns of the Day
Across the four entries, the division of labor is clear. Lewis and Clark coordinate on the official record — game tally, weather, the sand that plagues the party. Lewis alone elaborates with literary and scientific texture. Gass and Ordway, writing independently of one another and of the captains, preserve the small operational facts — a misidentified slough, a wolf-pup count, drying cargo, a forest fire — that round out the day. The April 24 entries are a compact illustration of why the expedition’s multiple journals are most valuable read together rather than separately.
