August 20, 1805 is the first full day in which the captains’ journals describe geographically separated activities, and the enlisted-men narrators line up cleanly behind one or the other. Lewis, Ordway, and Whitehouse remain at Camp Fortunate above the forks of the Beaverhead; Clark and Gass are already moving down what they hope will prove a navigable branch of the Columbia. The result is a record split almost exactly in half — half ethnographic and logistical, half topographic.
Camp Fortunate: Lewis’s covert cache
The three Camp Fortunate accounts cover identical ground but at radically different magnifications. Ordway and Whitehouse record the day in roughly a paragraph each — frost, two hunters out, women mending moccasins, Drouillard’s runaway beaver trap recovered two miles downriver, Goodrich’s trout. The verbal overlap between the two enlisted journals is heavy enough to confirm the documented Whitehouse-from-Ordway copying pattern: Ordway’s “the 2 Indians at our Camp behave verry well and their Squaws mend our mockisons” becomes Whitehouse’s “the 2 Indians who Stay at Camp behave well their women mend & make our moccasons.” The structural sequence — frost, hunters, Indians, beaver, trout, cache — is identical.
Lewis’s entry is where that compressed list expands into method. He alone explains the tradecraft of the cache:
I walked down the river about 3/4 of a mile and scelected a place near the river bank unperceived by the Indians for a cash, which I set three men to make, and directed the centinel to discharge his gun if he pereceived any of the Indians going down in that direction which was to be the signal for the men at work on the cash to desist and seperate, least these people should discover our deposit and rob us of the baggage we intend leaving here.
Lewis also documents the improvisation forced by the transition from river to land travel: rawhide thongs substituting for nails, oar blades and packing-box planks cut down to make twenty pack-saddles, and rawhide sacks replacing the wooden boxes whose lumber has been cannibalized. None of this material reasoning appears in Ordway or Whitehouse, who note only that a cache was begun. Lewis closes with a long ethnographic passage on Shoshone robes — antelope, bighorn, deer, occasionally beaver, marmot, or small wolf — that has no parallel in any other journal for this date.
Down the river with Clark
Clark and Gass are the only narrators describing the country southwest of the forks, and their accounts are usefully complementary. Clark is concerned with diplomacy and intelligence: a ceremonial halt and pipe before entering the Shoshone camp, a formal speech recapitulating the peace made with the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara, and a frustrated attempt to extract geographic information from people he suspects of “effecting” not to know. Gass, by contrast, supplies the ethnographic verdict Clark withholds:
They are the poorest and most miserable nation I ever beheld; having scarcely any thing to subsist on, except berries and a few fish… They have a great many fine horses, and nothing more; and on account of these they are much harrassed by other nations.
Gass also preserves a detail Clark omits — that the Shoshone “were sometimes reduced to such want, as to be obliged to eat their horses” — and gives the clearest summary of the day’s strategic pivot: the natives’ “very unfavourable accounts with respect to the rivers,” from which the party “understood that they were not navigable down, and expect to perform the rout by land.” Clark records procuring a guide but does not state the conclusion in those terms. Gass’s entry, characteristically, runs forward into August 21, blurring the day boundary in a way the other journals do not.
What the comparison reveals
Two small details surface only by triangulation. First, Clark’s report that the Shoshone “could only raise a Sammon & a little dried Choke Cherris” for his party squares precisely with Gass’s independent observation about berry-and-fish subsistence — corroboration from the two men who actually visited the village. Second, Clark notes killing “a Pheasent… larger than a dungal fowl with feshey protuberances about the head like a turkey,” almost certainly a sage grouse, a species description that no other narrator on this date attempts. The day’s record, taken whole, shows the expedition functioning as two coordinated halves: Lewis quietly burying what cannot be carried, Clark openly negotiating for what must be learned.
