The standoff near present-day Pierre, South Dakota produced one of the most-recounted moments in the expedition’s early ascent of the Missouri. With the keelboat’s anchor lost in the river sand the night before, the Corps prepared to cast off only to find Teton warriors gripping the cable. Four narrators — William Clark, Meriwether Lewis (via Ordway’s close paraphrase), Patrick Gass, and Joseph Whitehouse — left accounts of the same hour, and the differences among them illuminate how rank, vantage point, and audience shaped each man’s pen.
Who Held the Rope, and Who Gave the Order
Clark, writing as co-commander, frames the episode politically. He distinguishes carefully among the chiefs, naming the “2d Chief” as the instigator — “a Double Spoken man” — and credits the 1st Chief with ultimately freeing the cable. His second, expanded entry adds a striking detail of personal command:
I threw a Carot of Tobacco to 1s Chief Spoke So as to touch his pride took the port fire from the gunner the Chief gives the Tobaco to his Soldiers & he jurked the rope from them and handed it to the bows man
Clark’s revision foregrounds his own diplomatic maneuver — appealing to the chief’s pride — while quietly noting that he had taken up the port fire, ready to ignite the swivel gun. Ordway, by contrast, places Lewis at the center of the confrontation. In his telling, it is Captain Lewis who “appeared to be angarry,” who orders the sail hoisted, and who personally negotiates the successive carrots of tobacco. Ordway, as sergeant on deck, would have watched Lewis at the bow while Clark conferred with chiefs in the cabin; his account preserves the division of labor that Clark’s compresses.
Whitehouse heightens the drama further, writing that “Capt Lewis was near cutting the cable with his Sword and giving orders for the party to fire on them.” The detail of the drawn sword appears nowhere in Clark or Ordway, though Gass echoes the substance: “Captain Lewis was near giving orders to cut the rope and to fire on them.” The verbal closeness between Whitehouse and Gass — both enlisted men writing at one remove from the officers’ deliberations — suggests either shared talk among the men afterward or a common rumor circulating through the boat.
Register, Detail, and the Enlisted Eye
Gass’s published prose is the most polished, smoothing Whitehouse’s breathless syntax into measured sentences. Where Whitehouse counts “about 60 warries on the edge of the bank” with “Good bows and arrows ready for war,” Gass omits the number entirely and moves quickly to the resolution. Ordway, however, supplies the fullest inventory of arms: “about 200 Indians were then on the bank. Some had fire arms. Some had Spears. Some had a kind of cutlashes, and all the rest had Bows and steel or Iron pointed arrows.” The discrepancy between Whitehouse’s sixty and Ordway’s two hundred is characteristic — Whitehouse counts only the warriors at the cable, Ordway the whole assembly on the bank.
Gass alone digresses, in the same entry, into ethnographic observation about the dog-travois he had seen the previous day at the Indian camp:
they yoked a dog to a kind of car, which they have to haul their baggage from one camp to another; the nation having no settled place or village, but are always moving about.
The accompanying editorial footnote — comparing the Teton to “wandering Arabs” and quoting Mackenzie’s General History of the Fur Trade — reflects the hand of Gass’s editor David McKeehan rather than Gass himself, but it shapes how nineteenth-century readers received the Sioux encounter. No such framing appears in the manuscript journals of Clark, Ordway, or Whitehouse.
The Flags and the Following Day
Only Clark and Whitehouse mention the signal flags. Whitehouse records that the party “hoisted a white flag, and a red flag for peace or war,” while Clark explains the gesture diplomatically in a message sent back to the nation: “if they were for Peace Stay at home… and if they were for war or deturmined to attempt to Stop us, we were ready to defend our Selves.” Whitehouse seems to have absorbed the captains’ framing — “determined to fight our way, if we could not Go without” — almost verbatim, suggesting the officers’ interpretation circulated quickly among the men.
By Whitehouse’s and Gass’s accounts of the next morning, September 29, two more carrots of tobacco were sent ashore to chiefs who walked along the bank, but the boats did not stop. The expedition had decided, collectively, that further parley with the Teton was not worth the risk — a judgment all four narrators register, in their different registers, as relief.
