The expedition was now well into its descent of the Missouri, retracing in days what had taken weeks on the outbound journey. The entries of Patrick Gass, John Ordway, and William Clark for this Saturday cover the same sequence of events — an early start after a meeting with the trader Robert McClellan, a high head wind, hunters sent ahead, four or five deer killed, and a short run downriver — yet each narrator frames the day according to his habits of attention.
Three Registers of the Same Morning
Gass, characteristically, gives the barest skeleton. His sergeant’s log notes only the rain of the previous day, the unfavorable wind, a three-hour halt to hunt, and four deer killed before the party encamped at sunset. He says nothing of McClellan, nothing of Clark’s illness, nothing of the timber on the bottoms. His entry is the kind of compressed military summary he had been producing since the winter at Fort Mandan.
Ordway, by contrast, opens with the social texture Gass omits. He records the leave-taking from McClellan’s party in some detail:
our party as much whiskey as they would drink and gave our officers three bottles of wine and we took our leave of them
Where Gass counted four deer, Ordway counts five — a small discrepancy typical of the enlisted journals, where tallies were often jotted from memory after the fact. Ordway’s account of the day is otherwise brief, conceding only that they “detained along at different places to hunt” and “Camped having made but a Short distance this day.”
Clark’s Expansive Eye
Clark’s entry dwarfs the other two and is the only one to explain why the day was short. He names McClellan, records the morning dram, fixes the time of the wind’s interference, and gives the practical reason for laying by:
the wind being too high for us to proceed in Safty through the emecity of Snags which was imediately below
Neither Gass nor Ordway mentions the snags at all. Clark also alone reports his own ill health and McClellan’s gift of chocolate:
I felt my Self very unwell and derected a little Chocolate which Mr. McClellen gave us, prepared of which I drank about a pint and found great relief
This is one of the small medical asides that distinguish Clark’s homeward journals. He also alone preserves the day’s minor mishap — that George Shannon, the same young soldier who had been lost on the prairie in 1804, left his horn, pouch, powder, ball, and knife behind and did not realize it until nightfall.
The Botanist of the Bottom
The most striking divergence comes at the close of Clark’s entry, where he turns from event to environment. Having walked in the bottom while the hunters worked, he produces a catalogue of vegetation and birds that has no counterpart in the other journals:
cotton wood, Sycamore, ash mulberry, Elm of different Species, walnut, hickory, horn beem, pappaw arrow wood willow, prickly ash, &c and Grape vines, pees of 3 species
His comparison is telling — he calls this “the Growth of timber Common to the Illinois.” The expedition is now within a recognizable eastern forest, and Clark registers the homecoming through species rather than sentiment. Ordway’s two men, sent into the same bottom, had returned only with a turkey and the report “that the rushes was so high and thick that it was impossible to kill any deer.” Where the hunters saw an obstruction, Clark saw a flora worth listing.
Patterns of Attention
The three entries together illustrate a pattern visible across the homeward leg. Gass abbreviates; Ordway preserves social and ceremonial detail (the whiskey, the wine, the leave-taking) that the officers’ journals sometimes pass over; and Clark, even when unwell, expands into natural-historical observation. None of the three appears to be copying another on this date — the deer count differs, the noted details do not align, and Clark’s botanical list is wholly his own. The day’s eighteen miles are short by the standards of the descent, but the convergence of three independent voices on a single wind-bound afternoon offers an unusually full record of how the captains and their sergeants divided the labor of remembering.
