Enlisted Brevity: Gass and Ordway

Sergeant Gass produces the briefest entry of the three. His account is structured almost entirely around the party’s movements and small pleasures, beginning with the hunters going ahead and the remaining men passing time agreeably:

we amused ourselves till 10 o’clock gathering plumbs, of which there is great abundance at this place.

Gass notes the passage of White River, registers the navigational difficulty of the sand bars and shoals, and reports tersely that an attempted buffalo hunt about 2 o’clock was “unsuccessful.” His prose is functional and oriented to the soldier’s daily round.

Sergeant Ordway’s entry covers the same skeletal events but introduces details Gass omits entirely. Ordway records that the hunters did kill game in the afternoon — “we halted and killed Several buffaloe and deer” — directly contradicting Gass’s claim of an unsuccessful hunt, and suggesting Gass may have been writing only of the earlier attempt or of his own immediate party. More striking is Ordway’s domestic and commercial eye:

we Save all the buffaloe horns we can find to take to the States as they would make excelent k[n]ife and fork handles &C. &C.

This is the kind of practical, forward-looking detail Ordway frequently captures and that Gass tends to suppress. It anticipates the return to civilian life and the conversion of frontier abundance into manufactured goods — a register entirely absent from the other two narrators’ entries for this date.

Clark’s Expansive Survey

Captain Clark’s entry dwarfs both sergeants’ accounts in length and ambition. Where Gass gathers plums and Ordway counts horns, Clark coordinates hunting parties, dispatches men to investigate prairie dog towns (“the village of barking Squirels”), measures the width and depth of White River through Labiche and Willard’s wading reconnaissance, and notes the curious milky color of its waters. He tracks individual hunters by name — Drewyer, Labiche, Shannon, Willard, the Field brothers, Collins, Shields — and records the species and number of each kill with administrative precision.

The centerpiece of Clark’s entry, however, is a passage of natural-historical observation that has no parallel in either sergeant’s journal:

I assended to the high Country and from an eminance, I had a view of the plains for a great distance. from this eminance I had a view of a greater number of buffalow than I had ever Seen before at one time. I must have Seen near 20,000 of those animals feeding on this plain.

Clark immediately moves from the spectacle to an ethnographic and ecological inference:

I have observed that in the country between the nations which are at war with each other the greatest numbers of wild animals are to be found-

This is a hypothesis about the relationship between Indigenous warfare patterns and game distribution — essentially an argument that contested borderlands function as de facto game refuges. Neither Gass nor Ordway records the climb, the vista, the count, or the inference. Whether they were simply not present on the high ground or whether their journalistic register did not accommodate such reflections, the absence is telling.

Patterns of Omission and Register

The three entries together illustrate a recurring pattern in the expedition’s documentary record. The sergeants’ journals tend to compress the day into a sequence of movements and actions, with Ordway slightly more attentive than Gass to material culture and provisioning. Clark’s officer’s journal absorbs the same events but layers onto them administrative oversight, scientific measurement, and reflective generalization. Gass’s plum-gathering and Ordway’s knife-handle horns survive only because the sergeants chose to record what their captain did not — small human details that humanize the rapid descent of the Missouri and remind the reader that the famous twenty-thousand-buffalo vista was witnessed by men who had spent the morning eating fruit by the riverbank.

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Three Registers of the Same Storm

Rain dominates all three accounts, but each writer absorbs it differently. Ordway dispatches the weather in four words — rained all day — and devotes the rest of his entry to a tally of game. His sentence structure is additive and almost ledger-like:

our hunters killed 2 buffaloe I and willard killed a white bear. Some of the hunters killed 4 Ibex and 2 beavers, rained all day. Camped on an Island.

Lewis, traveling with Ordway’s party, registers the same kills but transforms them into a scientific procurement record. Where Ordway writes I and willard killed a white bear, Lewis specifies the same animal as a female brown bear with tallons 61/4 inches in length, noting that he preserved the skin of this bear also with the tallons; it was not large and in but low order. Ordway’s 4 Ibex become, in Lewis’s hand, bighorns pursued deliberately: the captain halted several times in the course of the day to kill some bighorns being anxious to procure a few more skins and skeletons of this animal. The two men describe identical events; only Lewis frames them as specimen collection for the expedition’s natural-history mission.

Lewis also closes with a phrase that, set beside Clark’s entry, becomes almost ironic: nothing extraordinary happened today.

Clark Alone at the Shoals

Clark, descending separately, has a far more eventful day, and his prose swells accordingly. He encounters what he names Buffalow Sholes and judges them in superlative terms:

This is by far the wost place which I have Seen on this river from the Rocky mountains to this place a distance of 694 miles by water.

The detail here is the detail of a working pilot. Clark notes the channel on the Stard Side near a high bluff, a drop of about 3 feet, and the necessity to let the Canoes down by hand for fear of their Strikeing a rock under water and Splitting. He measures cliffs at about 100 feet in hight, identifies the bedrock as hard and gritty of a dark brown Colour, and registers the first appearance of Birnt hills which I have Seen on this river. None of this geological observation appears in Lewis or Ordway, because neither was there — but the contrast also reflects Clark’s habitual attentiveness to navigability and landform.

Clark’s toponymy on this date is unusually dense. He names Buffalow Sholes after a buffalo standing in them, Bear rapid from the Circumstance of a bears being on a rock in the Middle of this rapid when I arived at it, and a nearly dry watercourse Yorks dry R. after his enslaved manservant — one of the rare commemorative namings Clark bestowed on York. The pattern is opportunistic: Clark names features for whatever animal or person occupies them at the moment of passage.

What Each Narrator Notices

The cross-narrator pattern is consistent with the broader journals. Ordway functions as a compressed sergeant’s log, useful chiefly for confirming that an event occurred and roughly tallying the hunt. Lewis converts shared events into taxonomic and measurable data, recording tallon length to the quarter inch and the body condition of the bear. Clark, when separated from Lewis, expands into the role the captains otherwise share: he becomes the geographer, hydrographer, and namer, attentive to channel width (from 3 to 400 yards wide), to the muddy discharge of ephemeral creeks that Contributes much to the muddiness of the river, and to the mechanics of lining canoes through dangerous water.

Notably, no narrator copies another on this date — the parties are physically separated, and the entries share no phrasing. The day thus offers a clean comparison of each writer’s instinctive priorities when describing wholly different scenes under the same date heading: Ordway counts, Lewis classifies, Clark charts.

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Lewis’s Lyrical Plain and Gass’s Plain Account

Lewis opens his entry in a register that is almost pastoral, attentive to weather, birdsong, and the aesthetic quality of the landscape:

the morning was fair and the plains looked beatifull the grass much improved by the late rain. the air was pleasant and a vast assemblage of little birds which croud to the groves on the river sung most enchantingly.

This sensibility quickly gives way to among the arresting buffalo passages in the journals. Lewis estimates ten thousand animals within a two-mile circle and notes the rutting bulls’ “tremendious roaring” audible “for many miles.” He even observes the behavioral effect on the expedition’s stock: “our horses had not been acquainted with the buffaloe they appeared much allarmed at their appearance and bellowing.” The detail about the seasonality of the rut — “it is now the season at which the buffaloe begin to coppelate” — is the kind of natural-history annotation Lewis habitually adds and that the enlisted journalists almost never do.

Gass, traveling with the same detachment and witnessing the same scene, reduces the entire spectacle to a working soldier’s summary:

Here our hunters, in a short time, killed five buffaloe; and we saved the best of the meat; and of the skins made two canoes to transport ourselves and baggage across the river. The buffaloe are in large droves about this place.

Where Lewis sees ten thousand animals and hears continual roaring, Gass records five killed and “large droves.” Gass’s published 1807 narrative was edited from his field notes by David McKeehan, and the compressed, task-focused register is consistent throughout. Notably, both Lewis and Gass agree on the operational core of the day: two skin canoes constructed from buffalo hides — one in “the mandan fassion with a single skin in the form of a bason” (Lewis) and another of Lewis’s own design.

Clark’s Navigational Detail, Ordway’s Beaver Census

Several hundred miles to the south, Clark and Ordway describe a wholly different country. Clark’s entry is the longest of the four and is dominated by river navigation: a “very crooked Chanel,” headwinds “from the S W imediately off Some high mountains Covered with Snow,” and the wind shifting “to the N. E.” by evening. He fixes locations with characteristic precision — passing Sergeant Pryor’s camp at the “beavers head,” then Philanthropy River, then arriving at the mouth of Wisdom (Big Hole) River, where he encamps in the exact “Spot we had encamped the 6th of August last” the previous year.

Clark also records a small archaeological detail of the expedition’s own past: “here we found a Bayonet which had been left & the Canoe quite safe.” He directs that the cached canoe be cannibalized — “that all the nails be taken out of this Canoe and paddles to be made of her Sides.”

Ordway, writing in the same camp on the same evening, confirms Clark’s framework but emphasizes a different fauna:

this evening the beaver Sign and lodges without number all this day. they are pleantier in this valley than I have seen on the route &C.

Clark independently corroborates this — “I have Seen great Nos. of Beaver on the banks and in the water as I passed down to day” — but Ordway’s superlative (“pleantier… than I have seen on the route”) is the kind of comparative judgment across the entire journey that the sergeant frequently ventured. The two accounts of the hunters’ kills differ slightly in their tallies: Ordway credits Collins with two deer and Gibson with a buck, while Clark records Collins’s deer at the morning rendezvous and then attributes the fat buck plus “5 young gees nearly grown” to Gibson and Colter together at Wisdom River.

Patterns Across the Divided Corps

The four entries together demonstrate the distinct narrative habits the expedition’s writers had settled into by their second summer in the field. Lewis frames landscape aesthetically and quantifies wildlife in dramatic round numbers. Clark privileges navigation, weather direction, and place-fixing against prior camps. Gass compresses to operational essentials. Ordway contributes the comparative ecological note. None of the four entries on July 11 appears to copy from another — they were, after all, written in two camps separated by mountains — but the systematic differences in register would persist even when the captains were side by side, and they remain the chief reason scholars continue to read all four journals together rather than relying on any single voice.

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The Same Camp, Three Registers

Lewis opens with a managerial inventory of tasks: tar-making, skin-attaching, bark-fitting, hunting for pemmican and hides. His tone quickly turns worried. The tar-kiln has failed to yield, and he confesses a procedural error in the boat’s construction:

I fear I have committed another blunder also in sewing the skins with a nedle which has sharp edges these have cut the skin and as it drys I discover that the throng dose not fill the holes as I expected tho I made them sew with a large throng for that purpose.

Yet within the same entry Lewis swings to optimism, declaring the vessel “extreemly well” shaped and “very light, more so than any vessel of her size that I ever saw.” He even permits himself a flash of humor about the impending loss of buffalo country: “the white puddings will be irretreivably lost and Sharbono out of imployment” — a reference to Toussaint Charbonneau’s prized boudin blanc, recorded by Lewis weeks earlier.

Clark, by contrast, condenses the day’s labor into a single brisk sentence in his field notes: “all of party employd in Sowing the Skins to the boat, burning Tare, preparing timber, hunting buffalow.” His expanded codex entry repeats the same catalog with more detail but conspicuously omits Lewis’s anxieties about the boat. Where Lewis frets, Clark simply reports.

Clark Borrows — and Borrows Heavily

The most revealing cross-narrator pattern lies in the second half of Clark’s expanded entry. The phrasing tracks Lewis’s prose almost verbatim. Lewis writes that the morning’s shower “scarcely wet the grass”; Clark records “a Small Shower at 1 oClock which did Scercely wet the grass.” Lewis notes “six beaver and 2 otter have been killed within the last three days”; Clark writes “Six beaver & 2 orters has been Killed at this camp within a fiew days.” The kill tally — “one buffalow and two Antilopes” — matches Lewis exactly.

This is consistent with the well-documented practice in which Clark expanded his journal by drawing directly on Lewis’s daily entry, sometimes copying whole phrases. What is more unusual is the long meteorological digression that follows, in which Clark proposes a hypothesis about the persistent southwesterly winds:

I think it possible that those almost perpetial S W. winds, proceed from the agency of the Snowey mountains and the wide leavel and untimbered plains which Streach themselves along their borders for an emence distance, that the air comeing in Contact with the Snow is Suddenly chilled and condensed, thus becomeing heavyer than the air beneath in the plains it glides down the Sides of those mountains and decends to the plains.

Clark then qualifies his own theory — “yet I am far from giveing full credit to this hypothesis” — and proposes a falsification test: if winds blow the other direction west of the mountains, the model gains support. A bracketed later note confirms the prediction held. This is Clark in a register he rarely adopts, working as a natural philosopher rather than a cartographer or quartermaster.

What Gass Sees That the Captains Miss

Patrick Gass, the carpenter-sergeant, files a markedly different entry. Excused from the boat work that consumes Lewis and Clark, Gass walks down to the falls he had not yet seen. His prose is plain but observant:

I found the 2nd pitch the most beautiful, though not the highest. About a mile below the upper pitch, the largest and most beautiful spring rises out of the bank of the Missouri on the south side that I ever beheld.

Neither Lewis nor Clark mentions this spring on this date, though Lewis had described comparable features on earlier reconnaissance trips. Gass also reports concrete numbers the captains overlook: seven buffalo killed during his excursion and a pack of “25 wolves in one gang.” Compare this to Lewis’s tally — “One buffaloe only and 2 Antelopes killed today” — and the discrepancy suggests Gass’s hunting party was counted separately, or that the sergeant’s published narrative (edited later by David McKeehan) consolidated kills across days.

Taken together, the three entries show the expedition’s documentary division of labor in microcosm: Lewis the worried engineer and naturalist, Clark the labor accountant and occasional theorist who leans on his co-captain’s prose, and Gass the working soldier whose published account preserves landscape impressions and quantitative details the officers, busy with their failing tar-kiln, simply did not record.

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Lewis’s Anxious Engineering

Lewis’s entry is by far the longest and the most introspective. Having moved the boat into the open, scaffolded her, and kindled fires beneath her to hasten drying, he sets men to pounding charcoal to compound with beeswax and buffalo tallow — a substitute caulking after pitch-bearing pine proved unavailable on the upper Missouri. The tone wavers between pride and dread:

now my only hope and resource for paying my boat; I sincerely hope it may answer yet I fear it will not. the boat in every other rispect completely answers my most sanguine expectation; she is not yet dry and eight men can carry her with the greatest ease; she is strong and will carry at least 8,000 lbs.

Lewis already diagnoses the failure he fears, noting that

the stitches begin to gape very much since she has began to dry

and reasoning that a sharp-pointed awl rather than a cutting needle would have preserved the seams. This is the entry of a man who has invested his reputation in an experiment and is watching the evidence accumulate against him. Within days the boat would indeed leak and be abandoned.

Clark’s External View

Clark’s entry covers the same camp but from outside the boat shed. He records the weather (

worm and Sultrey

), the unsuccessful stalk on a large gang of buffalo whose pursuit he led personally, the day’s tally of three buffalo, two wolves, and three antelope, and the three men sent to view the falls. His single sentence on the leather boat is striking in its brevity:

Capt. Lewis much engaged in Completeing the Leather boat.

Where Lewis devotes paragraphs to charcoal, beeswax, gaping stitches, and carrying capacity, Clark dispatches the project in seven words. The division of attention is characteristic: throughout the expedition Clark tends to chronicle the party’s movements and the country’s resources, while Lewis turns inward toward natural history, technical problems, and reflection.

Clark also notices what Lewis does not —

great numbers of young black birds

— a small ornithological detail from the hand usually thought less attentive to such things than Lewis. It is a useful reminder that the conventional contrast between Lewis-the-naturalist and Clark-the-cartographer breaks down on any given page.

Gass’s Sergeant’s-Eye Compression

Patrick Gass, writing for what would become the first published account of the expedition, reduces the day to its bottom line:

us who were engaged at the boat, went to hunt; at night they came in and had killed several buffaloe and some cabres or antelopes.

Gass identifies himself with the boat-working detail (us who were engaged at the boat), confirming Lewis’s reference to the men assigned to the project, but he offers no detail about the work itself. His vocabulary preserves the frontier French loanword cabres for antelope — a usage neither captain employs on this date — suggesting he is registering the spoken speech of the camp’s engagés and Canadian hands rather than the captains’ more anglicized antelopes. Gass’s economy is partly a function of his journal’s purpose: a sergeant’s daily log rather than a captain’s report to Jefferson.

Cross-Narrator Patterns

The three accounts converge on a small set of verifiable facts — three buffalo, two wolves, three antelope, three men sent to the falls, the leather boat under work — but diverge sharply in what each narrator considers worth recording around those facts. Lewis alone offers the meditative observation that scattered buffalo herds, however distant, tend to travel in one direction when undisturbed, and that the plains here are less fertile and stonier than below the Musselshell. These are the kinds of generalizations Clark and Gass typically leave to him. Conversely, Clark’s notice of the young blackbirds and Gass’s vernacular cabres each preserve something the other narrators miss. Read together, the three entries demonstrate why no single journal suffices: the day at the portage camp exists fully only in their overlap.

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The Buffalo in Camp: Compression Versus Detail

Gass opens his account of the previous night’s intrusion with characteristic economy. He reports that around midnight a buffalo swimming the river

happened to land at one of the periogues, crossed over it and broke two guns, but not so as to render them useless. He then went straight on through the men where they were sleeping, but hurt none of them.

Whitehouse, narrating the same event, supplies a more textured picture. He specifies the weapons damaged — "broke a blunder-buss, & bent a rifle" — and renders the danger to the men more vividly: the bull "came up the bank through the Camp & like to have tramped on Several of the men as they were a Sleep." Where Gass closes the matter with a brisk reassurance that no one was hurt, Whitehouse lingers on the near-miss. Notably, neither enlisted journalist mentions Seaman, the Newfoundland dog whom Lewis credited (in the curated commentary supplied with these entries) with raising the alarm. The absence is itself revealing: Gass and Whitehouse, sleeping among the men, may not have witnessed the dog’s role, or may simply not have considered it worth recording. The captains’ journals and the sergeants’ journals frequently diverge on which actors — human or animal — deserve narrative credit.

The Buffalo Jump and the Question of Identification

Both men note the site where Indians had driven a herd of buffalo over a precipice. Gass records the fact in a single sentence:

As we came along to-day we passed a place where the Indians had driven above an hundred head of buffaloe down a precipice and killed them.

Whitehouse, writing at greater length throughout his entry, describes "high Steep clifts of rocks on the N.S. where the natives had lately drove a gang of buffaloe off from the plains," adds the sensory detail that "the wolves & bears are feasting on the remains, which causes a horrid Smell," and reports that "Cap! Clark killed a wolf with a Sphere [spear] near that place." Whitehouse also attempts ethnographic identification of a nearby campsite of "about 100 lodges," speculating that it belonged to "a nation called the blackfoot Indians which live back from the River, to the Northward," and notes that the party collected some of the abandoned dog poles. Gass omits both the campsite and the speculation entirely.

The contrast illustrates a recurring pattern in cross-narrator comparison: Gass, whose journal would be the first published account of the expedition (1807), tends toward a clipped, declarative register suited to a printer’s expectations, while Whitehouse’s manuscript preserves the looser, more accretive texture of a daily field diary — sights, smells, suspicions, and incidental episodes all kept in.

Weather, Distance, and the Shape of a Day

Both narrators agree on the day’s mileage (eighteen miles), the afternoon rain, the elk killed by hunters, and the camp made in a grove of timber. Whitehouse, however, situates the camp on the "N.S." (north side) while Gass places it on "the South side" — a discrepancy of the sort that bedevils geographic reconstruction of the expedition’s route and that editors have long had to reconcile against the captains’ more authoritative entries. Whitehouse further records details Gass omits entirely: the high northwest wind, the snow and hail reported by hunters returning from the hills, the "draughm of ardent Spirits" issued to each man, the geese on the river, and his summary characterization of the terrain as "a Mountaneous desert Country."

Read together, the two entries demonstrate how the expedition’s enlisted journalists functioned as complementary rather than redundant witnesses. Gass supplies the spine of events; Whitehouse fleshes them out. Where they overlap — on the buffalo, the precipice, the elk — they corroborate one another. Where they diverge, the differences expose the editorial selectivity each man practiced, consciously or not, in deciding what a journal of the Corps of Discovery ought to contain.

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Gass and the axletree

Gass’s fragment opens mid-sentence, already on the prairie with a canoe on a wagon “loaded heavy with baggage,” and with “his wife” in the moving party. The rest of the entry orbits a single mechanical failure:

We went on slowly as our axletrees were weak; and about 12 o’clock one of them broke; when we had to halt and put in a new one. This accident happened at a draught where there was some willow, and we put in an axletree of that; which I believe is the best this country affords for the purpose.

A problem identified, a field repair, a craftsman’s verdict on local willow. He notes only that it was “late in the evening” before they reached “the intended place of embarkation on the river.” He does not name the captains, the iron boat, buffalo, or York.

Whitehouse’s wider lens

Whitehouse opens with weather — “a fair pleasant morning. the wind as usal” — and widens the lens. He tracks the division of labor Gass does not record:

Cap! Lewis and Clark with all the party except 3 Set out with a waggon & baggage to take the canoe & loading which was halled on the hill yesterday up to the upper end of the portage, where we Shall form a Camp. Capt Lewis & 3 or 4 men carried all their baggage in order to Stay up their, in order to git the Iron boat in readiness &c.

He says nothing of a broken axletree. Either he was not at the willow draught, or he judged it not worth setting beside what he heard from Clark. The buffalo around the lower camp were “verry thick,” and “Some gangs Swam the River.” Then a domestic line: “Cap! Clarks Servant york killed one which was verry fat.”

What Clark told the camp

The longest passage in either journal is Whitehouse reporting Clark, not writing as Clark:

Cap! Clark informed us that he Saw 40 or 50 Swimming the River ab’ the falls and Some went down over them which he could not See them rise any more. a nomber got to Shore half drowned. in this way great numbers of those animels are lost and accounts for So many as we Saw lying on the Shores below the falls ever Since we came from the Mandans & Grossvauntares

Whitehouse here does something Gass does not: he reasons backward along the river they have already traveled. The carcasses on the shores below the falls, he infers from Clark’s report, are the animals that went over and did not rise. He adds that such losses are “a vast deal pleantier” near the falls. That natural-historical inference is the private’s. It should not be read as a surviving Clark entry for June 22.

Whitehouse closes on country, not wagons: high land, “no timber back from the river and but verry little on the river, but bluffs & high Clifts the most of the Shores,” and a country note — “we are a little South of the Mandans, but have had no verry hot weather as yet.” Gass, at the willow draught, registers none of this. Read together, the two pages default to habit. Gass keeps the broken thing and the fix. Whitehouse keeps the captains’ split, York’s fat buffalo, and what Clark said at the falls.

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The Lean Buffalo at Dinner

The central episode of the day is a midday halt at which buffalo were killed but found too poor to use. Lewis tells the story in the first person and with characteristic self-deprecation:

at the place we halted to dine on the Lard. side we met with a herd of buffaloe of which I killed the fatest as I concieved among them, however on examining it I found it so poar that I thought it unfit for uce and only took the tongue; the party killed another which was still more lean.

Clark, walking onshore on the opposite bank, did not witness the kill but records it secondhand and in flatter terms: “Capt. Lewis killed 2 Buffalow buls which was near the water at the time of dineing, they were So pore as to be unfit for use.” Clark consolidates Lewis’s two animals into a single sentence and drops the wry detail about choosing what seemed the fattest.

Ordway, traveling with the main party, supplies a third angle: “one of the hunters killed one Cap^t Lewis killed one large one in a fiew minutes they being poor we took only the tongues of them.” Ordway alone preserves the detail that both tongues — not just one — were taken, and he credits an unnamed hunter with the first kill rather than “the party.” Gass, by contrast, compresses the episode beyond recognition: “two men went out and in a few minutes killed 2 buffaloe,” omitting Lewis’s participation and the animals’ poor condition entirely. The phrase “in a few minutes” appears in both Gass and Ordway, a small verbal echo suggesting one sergeant glanced at the other’s notes — or that both drew on a shared oral report at camp.

Assiniboin Signs and the Captains’ Shared Sentence

The clearest evidence of direct textual borrowing on this date lies in the captains’ parallel descriptions of Indian sign. Lewis writes that Clark “informed me that he had seen the remains of the Assinniboin encampments in every point of woodland through which he had passed.” Clark’s own entry recasts the same observation almost verbatim: “Saw the remains of Indian camps in every point of timbered land on the S. S.” The shared formula “in every point of [woodland/timbered land]” confirms that one captain consulted the other when writing up the day — a pattern familiar throughout the journals, though the direction of copying here is ambiguous.

Both captains then converge on the evening’s discovery of four rafts and fresh tracks. Lewis: “they left four rafts of timber on the Stard. side, on which they had passed. we supposed them to have been a party of the Assinniboins who had been to war against the rocky mountain Indians.” Clark: “Saw Some fresh Indians track and four rafts on the shore S. S. Those I prosume were Ossinniboins who had been on a war party against the Rockey Mountain Indians.” Neither sergeant mentions the rafts at all — a striking omission given the security implications, and a reminder that Gass and Ordway tend to record what the working party did rather than what the captains inferred.

What Each Narrator Notices Alone

Each journalist preserves details the others miss. Gass alone reports that “some rain had fallen during the day, where we encamped, though there was none where we had been” — a localized weather observation Clark gestures at only obliquely with his “thunder gust” from the southwest. Ordway is the day’s natural historian of small things: he alone notes the morning’s beaver and “Several Small fish,” the catfish caught at the sand-beach camp, and the “red hills” and “high raged hills which are rough barron broken & Steep.”

Clark, walking the shore, supplies the day’s richest wildlife inventory — antelope, elk, white wolves, and a pond “formed on the S. S. by the Missouries Changeing its bead” holding swan, geese, and ducks. Lewis, meanwhile, devotes a long passage to the bears the party has not seen, weighing Indian warnings against expedition experience: “the Indian account of them dose not corrispond with our experience so far.” He also offers the day’s only culinary judgment, declaring beaver “excellent; particularly the tale, and liver” — a small ethnographic note on the men’s preferences that the other three journalists collapse into Clark’s terser “preferred by the party to any other at this Season.”

Across the four entries, a consistent hierarchy of register emerges: Lewis discursive and reflective, Clark documentary and geographic, Ordway granular and inventorial, Gass concise and labor-focused. April 17 is unremarkable in expedition terms, but precisely for that reason it shows the four voices in their settled working relation.

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Three Scales of Attention

Ordway’s entry is the briefest and the most quantitative. He notes only a measurement of precipitation and the ongoing labor of the camp:

22 Inches in 22 hours, we continue gitting ready to Start up the River.

The terseness is characteristic of Ordway’s sergeant’s-log style — a running tally of weather data and collective activity (“we continue gitting ready”), with little narrative elaboration. The figure of twenty-two inches in twenty-two hours, almost certainly referring to a snow or rain accumulation reading, suggests Ordway was keeping a meteorological register of the kind the captains expected from their non-commissioned officers.

Clark, by contrast, lifts his eyes from the camp itself to the river and the surrounding Mandan community. His entry attends to causes and consequences:

The ice has Stoped running owing to Som obstickle above, repare the Boat & Perogues, and prepareing to Set out but few Indians visit us to day they are now attending on the river bank to Catch the floating Buffalow

Clark offers what Ordway does not: an explanatory hypothesis (“owing to Som obstickle above”) and an ethnographic detail of considerable importance — the Mandan practice of harvesting drowned buffalo carcasses carried downstream by the spring breakup. This observation, casually inserted, is one of the more vivid documentations of a seasonal subsistence strategy that other expedition members elsewhere describe with greater astonishment. Clark renders it matter-of-factly, as an explanation for the unusual quiet at the fort.

Gass and the Problem of the Composite Entry

The Gass material presented for this date is the most textually complex, in part because the surviving page (as transcribed via OCR) bleeds across multiple days. The 29 March content proper concerns weather and a reconnaissance trip:

rain in the morning ; but a fine forenoon after it. Captain Lewis and a hunter went down the river about 7 miles, to see a very large spring which rises out of the bank of the Missouri on the south side. In the afternoon there was another heavy shower of rain, and after it a fine evening.

Where Ordway flattens the day into a single measurement and Clark frames it through Mandan activity, Gass narrates it as a sequence of meteorological turns punctuated by an excursion. His attention to Lewis’s seven-mile trip to view a large spring is not echoed in either Ordway or Clark for this date — a reminder that Gass, whose published 1807 journal was the first expedition account to reach print, frequently preserved small expeditionary side-trips that the captains’ own journals omitted or deferred.

The remainder of the Gass page drifts forward into entries datable to early April — including the well-known flash-flood episode in which Sacagawea (“the Indian woman and child”) nearly perished in a ravine, and the later attack on a brown bear on an island. These episodes are not from 29 March and reflect the typesetting of the printed Gass volume rather than the day under analysis. The OCR artifact is itself instructive: it illustrates how Gass’s published text, mediated by editor David McKeehan, packages multiple days into continuous narrative paragraphs in a way that the manuscript journals of Clark and Ordway do not.

Register and Audience

Read together, the three entries display the stratified documentary culture of the expedition. Ordway writes for the captains, producing data. Clark writes as the expedition’s principal field observer, integrating environment, indigenous practice, and logistics into a single sentence. Gass — or rather Gass-as-edited — writes for an eventual reading public, with a fuller narrative arc and a taste for incident. None of the three contradicts the others; rather, each reveals what his role and his intended reader led him to record. On the eve of departure from Fort Mandan, the same day looks like a rainfall total, a riverbank tableau of Mandan hunters, and a scenic excursion to a spring, depending on whose pen one consults.

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Parallel Labor, Divergent Registers

Ordway’s entry is brief and crew-focused. Writing from the perspective of the working party, he notes the weather and the men’s tasks in a single compact sentence:

night, a pleasant morning. The Ice continues to run. the party employed fixing their perogues oars and poles, So that we may be ready to set out as Soon as the Ice is done running.

The sergeant’s prose is functional, oriented toward readiness. His vantage is that of a man among the workers—”the party employed”—and his temporal horizon extends only as far as the next milestone: the moment the ice stops running and the boats can launch.

Clark, by contrast, produces two overlapping entries for the same date, and together they sprawl across weather, carpentry, river ice, Mandan ethnography, and zoology. His shorter notation records the technical work:

28th had all the Canoes, the Perogus corked pitchd & lined cover the Cotton Wood, which is win Shaken

His fuller entry expands the same observation with greater precision—”corked pitched & tirred in and on the cracks and windshake which is universially in the Cotton wood”—and adds meteorological detail absent from Ordway: “a windey Blustering Day wind S W ice running the river Blocked up in view for the Space of 4 hours and gave way leaveing great quantity of ice on the Shallow Sand bars.”

Where Ordway calls the morning “pleasant,” Clark calls the day “windey Blustering.” The discrepancy is not necessarily contradictory—Ordway wrote of the morning, Clark of the whole day—but it illustrates how rapidly conditions shifted on the upper Missouri in late March, and how each man fixed his observation to a different slice of the day.

What Clark Sees That Ordway Does Not

The most striking difference between the two narrators on this date lies in what Clark records that Ordway omits entirely. Clark twice turns his attention to Mandan practice. First, in a parenthetical aside about cottonwood, he notes:

(the Mandans feed their horses on the cotton wood Sticks in places of corn)

This is the kind of ethnographic aperçu that surfaces repeatedly in Clark’s Fort Mandan winter writing—an observation triggered by the Corps’ own use of the same tree for boat repair. The cottonwood is simultaneously a structural material for the Americans and a fodder substitute for the Mandans, and Clark registers both functions in a single entry.

His second ethnographic note is more arresting still. Clark observes that few Indians visited the fort because they were occupied at the river:

they are watching to catch the floating Buffalow which brake through the ice in Crossing, those people are fond of those animals tainted and Catch great numbers every Spring

The detail is remarkable on multiple counts. Clark documents a seasonal subsistence practice—the spring harvest of drowned bison swept downriver after falling through weakened ice—and notes without judgment the Mandan preference for the meat in its tainted state. Ordway’s silence on this practice is characteristic; the sergeant rarely strays from the immediate concerns of the working detachment, while Clark, as a captain charged with intelligence-gathering, treats the day’s interactions with the Mandans as data worth preserving.

The Shape of the Record

Read together, the two entries demonstrate how the expedition’s documentary record was layered rather than redundant. Ordway confirms the timing and nature of the work; Clark confirms the same and adds the environmental, technical, and cultural context that gives the day its texture. The shared elements—ice running, boats being prepared, departure imminent—anchor the date. The unshared elements—wind direction, the windshake in the cottonwood, Mandan horse-feeding, the floating buffalo—belong to Clark alone among these two voices, and would be lost to the historical record had he not written them down.

The contrast also previews a pattern that will hold through the journey ahead: Ordway as the steady chronicler of the Corps’ internal life, Clark as the broader observer of the world through which the Corps moved.

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