September 10, 1805 was meant to be a logistical pause. The captains halted at Travelers’ Rest Creek to take observations, rest horses, and stockpile meat for the mountain crossing the guide warned would yield no game. What the day actually produced was an encounter that reshaped the expedition’s near-term geography: three Flathead riders, brought into camp by John Colter, one of whom agreed to continue west as a guide.
The halt and the hunt
All five narrators agree on the day’s purpose and weather, but the bookkeeping varies. Clark fixes the latitude at
46° 48′ 28″
and tallies the hunters’ return at
4 deer a Beaver & 3 Grouse
. Gass, writing more impressionistically, records only
2 deer
killed at midday and
two cranes
on the move — and notably has the party traveling roughly twenty miles down the creek, not halting in camp. This is the day’s sharpest disagreement: Gass describes movement while Lewis, Clark, Ordway, and Whitehouse all describe a stationary camp. Either Gass has conflated this entry with an adjacent day, or his sense of the halt was looser than the captains’.
Ordway and Whitehouse, who frequently track one another closely, agree on
4 Deer a faun and Several ducks and geese
, a tally that diverges from Clark’s beaver-and-grouse count. Whitehouse adds botanical detail neither captain bothers with:
considerable of cotton timber on this creek the choke cherries abound on its bottoms. the natives has lately gethered an amence quantities of them here for food
. He alone registers the recent Indigenous presence on the ground itself — evidence of seasonal harvest the captains pass over.
Colter’s encounter, told five ways
The arrival of the three Flathead riders is the day’s narrative center, and the variation across accounts is instructive. Ordway and Whitehouse give nearly identical sequences — the hunter laying down his gun, the Indians approaching
in a friendly manner
, the ride
verry fast
back to camp — confirming again the Ordway-Whitehouse textual relationship, with Whitehouse expanding rather than rewriting.
Clark alone names the hunter:
one of the hunters Colter, met with 3 Tushapaw Indians
. He also alone records the diplomatic exchange of goods —
we gave them a ring fish hook & tied a pece of ribin in the hare of each
and Lewis’s gift of
a Steel & a little Powder to make fire
. Lewis, who one might expect to record his own gift, omits it and instead supplies ethnographic generalization: the Flatheads
have a great abundance
of horses,
each man in the nation possesses from 20 to a hundred head
, and are
a very light coloured people of large stature and comely form
.
The number of stolen horses migrates across the entries: Ordway says 2, Whitehouse 22, Lewis 23, Clark 21. The Ordway figure is almost certainly a transcription slip; the captains’ numbers bracket a real but uncertain count. Small evidence of how oral information, conveyed by signs, hardened differently in each notebook.
Geography by hearsay
Lewis uses the day to speculate at length about western hydrography, naming the eastern fork the
Valley plain river
and theorizing it joins the
Tacootchetessee
— the Fraser, in Mackenzie’s nomenclature. Whitehouse independently records the guide’s claim that
these waters runs in to Mackinzees River as near as they can give an account
, a striking convergence suggesting this geographical theory circulated in camp, not just in Lewis’s head.
Lewis alone preserves the new guide’s tantalizing report: that some of his relations
were at the sea last fall and saw an old whiteman who resided there by himself
and gave them handkerchiefs. Five sleeps, six days’ travel, to reach the relations on the Columbia. The figure would prove optimistic — the Bitterroot crossing lay ahead — but on the evening of September 10, the Pacific had, for the first time, a concrete human informant attached to it.
