The journal entries for May 29, 1805, offer a rare opportunity to compare two enlisted-man accounts of the same chaotic night and the same day’s travel along the Missouri. Patrick Gass and Joseph Whitehouse both describe a buffalo’s nocturnal stampede through camp, the day’s eighteen miles of progress, and the gruesome remains of an Indian buffalo jump. Yet the two narrators differ markedly in how much they record, how they characterize what they see, and which threads of expedition life they emphasize.
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.
