The entries for October 2, 1804 cluster around two events: the morning visit of the trader Jean Vallé, who came aboard near the mouth of the Cheyenne (Chien) River, and an afternoon encounter with a small party of Sioux on the bluffs of the north shore. All four narrators — Patrick Gass, John Ordway, Joseph Whitehouse, and William Clark — describe the same sequence, but their accounts diverge in detail, register, and degree of alarm in ways that illuminate how information moved through the expedition’s writing community.
Vallé’s Intelligence and the Question of Further Sioux Contact
Gass and Ordway both register Vallé’s reassurance about the road ahead. Gass paraphrases the trader’s opinion that the party “should see no more Indians, until we should arrive at the nation of Rees,” while Ordway records nearly the same message in close parallel:
he in-formed us that we Should not see many more of the Souix to Trouble us.
The verbal closeness between Gass and Ordway here is characteristic of their working relationship throughout the journals; Gass, whose journal was prepared for publication by an editor, often smooths Ordway’s rougher field phrasing into more formal English. Whitehouse, by contrast, omits Vallé entirely, beginning his entry simply “Set off eairly.” Clark alone preserves the trader’s full name — “Mr. Jon Vallee” — and adds the practical detail that Vallé “proceeded on 2 miles with us” before turning back. Clark’s longer notebook entry also supplies the geographic context the enlisted men leave out: a meridian altitude taken “at the upper part of the gouge of the Lookout bend” yielding latitude 44° 19′ 36″ N.
The Gunshot on the Bluffs
The afternoon encounter shows the sharpest divergence in tone. Whitehouse’s account is the most emotionally charged of the four:
one of them came down on the bank of the river & fired off his Gun and cryed out. we hardly new his meaning but we held our-selves in rediness in case they Should attack us we were deter-mined to fight or dye.
The phrase “fight or dye” appears nowhere in the other three narrators and reflects Whitehouse’s habitual willingness to dramatize danger. Gass renders the same moment in cooler language — “the object or intention we did not well understand, but were ready to meet an attack” — preserving the wariness without the rhetorical flourish.
Ordway adds a detail neither Gass nor Whitehouse records: he reports that the Indian called out “in the Yanktown Souix language that he wanted us to come to Shore,” and that the man identified his band as having “20 lodges.” Gass corroborates the lodge count and identifies the band as “the Jonkta or Barbarole” (Yankton), suggesting Ordway’s linguistic note is the source, possibly relayed through Pierre Dorion’s earlier interpreting work referenced in Clark.
Clark’s two-part entry — a terse field note and a fuller notebook revision — is the most diplomatically detailed. He alone records the back-and-forth of the exchange: the Indian “followed on Some distance, we Spoke a few words to him, he wished us to go a Shore and to his Camp which was over the hill and Consisted of 20 Lodges, we excused our Selves advised him to go and here our talk of Mr. Durion.” Where Whitehouse sees an imminent fight, Clark sees a refused invitation and a redirected diplomatic referral.
Caution Island and the Expectation of the Tetons
All four accounts mention camping on a sand bar in the middle of the river, but only Clark explains the naming of the nearby island. Twice he records: “This Island we call Isd. of Caution,” and links the name to the company’s expectation that “the Tetons would attempt to Stop us and under that Hear we prepared our Selves for action which we expected every moment.” Ordway’s manuscript carries an editorial gloss confirming the same name (“This Island we call Isd of Caution. Clark”), indicating that the toponym originated with the captain and propagated outward.
The pattern across these four entries is consistent with what appears throughout the journals of this stretch: Clark supplies geographic and diplomatic specificity; Ordway provides the linguistic and ethnographic middle layer; Gass polishes Ordway’s substance into publishable prose; and Whitehouse, writing for himself, captures the emotional pulse of the rank and file. The single gunshot from the bluff, heard by all, becomes four different events on the page.
