The journal entries for May 19, 1805, offer a textbook case of how the enlisted journalists of the Corps of Discovery cross-pollinated their daily records. Patrick Gass, John Ordway, and Joseph Whitehouse each set down an account of the day’s progress along the Missouri, and the parallels between the texts are too close to be coincidence. Yet the small divergences — particularly a single sentence in Ordway’s entry — reveal which narrator was paying closest attention, and to what.
Three Versions, One Day’s March
Gass, the most laconic of the three, compresses the day into two sentences, noting only that The river is handsome and the country mountainous
and that the party made 20 1-4 miles and encamped on the North side in a small bottom.
His mileage figure stands slightly apart from the eighteen miles recorded by both Ordway and Whitehouse, a discrepancy of roughly two miles that recurs intermittently across the journals and likely reflects independent estimation rather than copying.
Ordway and Whitehouse, by contrast, share phrasing so closely that one entry plainly informed the other. Compare their accounts of the afternoon:
about 2 we proceeded on passed a willow Island near the N. Shore passed high pitch pine & ceeder hills as usal. (Ordway)
about 2 we proceeded on passed a handsom willow Island near the N.S. of River. passed pitch pine & ceeder hills as usal (Whitehouse)
The shared formula as usal
, the identical sequencing of landmarks, and the matching tally of game (Captain Clark’s three deer, Lewis’s elk at the encampment, three additional deer and three beaver from the hunters) all point to a textual relationship. Whitehouse’s slightly more polished register — he calls the island handsom
where Ordway gives only a willow Island
— is consistent with the broader pattern in which Whitehouse appears to have worked from Ordway’s notes while occasionally smoothing the prose.
The Detail Only Ordway Recorded
What sets Ordway’s entry apart, and sets it apart, is a single clause buried in the morning’s narrative:
Semon Capt Lewiss dog got bit by a beaver
Whitehouse, despite mirroring Ordway’s account in nearly every other particular — the seven o’clock start, the young brown bear killed at ten, the dinner halt at one — omits the incident entirely. Gass makes no mention of it either. The episode is well known to expedition scholars because Lewis himself recorded it at length, describing how the beaver severed an artery in Seaman’s hind leg and how he feared the dog would bleed to death.
That Ordway alone among the sergeants thought to preserve the moment suggests either that he was closer to Lewis’s mess that day, or simply that he, more than his fellow journalists, registered the welfare of the captain’s Newfoundland as expedition-worthy news.
The omission in Whitehouse is particularly telling. If Whitehouse was indeed copying from Ordway — as the verbal parallels strongly imply — then he made an editorial choice to drop the beaver bite, perhaps judging it incidental to the day’s geographical and hunting record. Such silent excisions are a reminder that even the most apparently derivative enlisted journals reflect their authors’ judgments about what mattered.
Register and Reach
Read together, the three entries illustrate the stratification of the expedition’s documentary record. Gass, whose journal would be the first to reach print in 1807, offers the compressed, publishable summary: mileage, terrain, encampment. Ordway provides the granular daily log, dense with hours, named individuals, and incidental detail. Whitehouse mediates between them, retaining most of Ordway’s specificity while trimming what he deems extraneous.
For modern readers, the value of reading the three side by side lies precisely in the friction between them. Without Ordway’s offhand notation, an account of May 19 drawn only from the sergeants would obscure one of the more memorable canine episodes of the journey — and would leave Lewis’s anxious bedside vigil over Seaman without enlisted corroboration.
