September 28, 1804, below the Teton villages near present Pierre. The keelboat’s anchor was lost in the sand the night before. When the party tried to cast off, warriors took the cable. Four published journals record that hour: William Clark, John Ordway, Patrick Gass, and Joseph Whitehouse. Meriwether Lewis left no journal for this date in this corpus. He is on the bow in the other men’s sentences, not a fifth pen.
Who held the rope
Clark writes as co-commander and names ranks among the Teton. The class called Soldiers seized the cable. The first chief was still on board, intending to go a short distance up. The second chief demanded a flag and tobacco and was refused. Clark’s expanded draft puts himself at the gun:
I threw a Carot of Tobacco to 1 s 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
The first chief, not the second, frees the boat. Two miles up, the third chief, taken from a sand bar, says the rope was held by order of the second, “a Double Spoken man.”
Ordway, on deck, does not give Clark that diplomatic close-up. He has Clark speaking to chiefs in the cabin while Lewis comes out, orders every man to his place, and orders the sail hoisted. A man unties the cord; two or three warriors tie it faster. Then, in Ordway’s telling, it is Lewis who “appeared to be angarry,” and it is Lewis who hands over the carrots of tobacco after the captains refuse to be trifled with. Ordway’s Lewis is an actor in Ordway’s journal, not a missing captain’s draft recovered by paraphrase.
Whitehouse and Gass put Lewis nearer to cutting the line. Whitehouse:
Cap’ Lewis was near cutting the cable with his Sword
Gass, in McKeehan’s prose, drops the sword and keeps the substance: Lewis “was near giving orders to cut the rope” and to fire on them. Clark never writes the sword. The enlisted closeness — a sword in Whitehouse, fire in both — is how the men remembered the bow, not how Clark wrote the chiefs.
Numbers, arms, and a dog in harness
Whitehouse counts “about 60 warries on the edge of the bank,” some with firearms, the rest with “Good bows and arrows ready for war,” after women and children have been sent off. Ordway counts a larger crowd:
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.
Sixty at the cable, or two hundred on the bank: different jobs of counting. Gass gives no number and moves to the resolution. He does, in the same printed entry, look back to the Indian camp of the day before:
they yoked a dog to a kind of car, which they have to haul their baggage from one camp to another
The dogs, he adds, are not large, much resemble a wolf, and will haul about seventy pounds. A footnote comparing the Teton to “wandering Arabs” and quoting Mackenzie’s fur-trade history is David McKeehan’s, not Gass’s field prose. Clark, Ordway, and Whitehouse have no such frame.
Flags, a talk, and not stopping
Clark and Whitehouse both record the flags. Whitehouse: the party “hoisted a white flag, and a red flag for peace or war,” and was “determined to fight our way, if we could not Go without.” Clark explains the same signal in a talk sent back with the third chief’s son: if they were for peace, stay at home and do as directed; “if they were for war or deturmined to attempt to Stop us, we were ready to defend our Selves.” An Indian who follows along the beach is taken on board. He says three hundred more have arrived and wants the boats to stop. They do not. Gass and Ordway have that passenger too. Stones serve for an anchor. At sunset they lie at a small mid-river sand bar. Clark is “verry unwell” for want of sleep.
Whitehouse’s and Gass’s printed texts continue into the next morning: a carrot or two of tobacco for men on the bank, and a refusal to land again before the Arikara. That judgment — no more Teton parley on shore — is in all four books, in different registers: Clark’s talk under the flags, Ordway’s resolve not to camp on shore, Gass’s message sent to a sand bar, Whitehouse’s determination to go on.
