The entries for October 15, 1804, capture the Corps of Discovery moving upriver through a stretch of the Missouri thick with Arikara hunting parties returning to their villages. Four narrators — William Clark, John Ordway, Patrick Gass, and Joseph Whitehouse — were present, and the contrasts among their accounts illuminate how differently each writer registered the same day’s events.
A Shared Core, Differently Weighted
Clark, Ordway, and Gass all anchor their entries on the same sequence: an early start in the rain, a meeting with an Arikara hunting party traveling downriver in buffalo-hide canoes, an exchange of meat for fishhooks and beads, and an evening encampment near a village of about ten lodges. The overlap is close enough to suggest the enlisted journalists were drawing on shared conversation or observation rather than independently composing.
Ordway provides the most quantitatively precise account, specifying:
they had 12 Cannoes made of Buffalow hides loaded with excelent fat meat, we halted with them about 2 hours
Gass echoes the same figure almost verbatim — “12 buffaloe-skin canoes or boats laden with meat and skins” — but adds a detail the others omit entirely: horses traveling down the bank by land alongside the river party. Gass also alone records a striking human episode involving Sacagawea (referred to as “our young squaw”):
One of these requested to speak with our young squaw, who for some time hid herself, but at last came out and spoke with him. She then went on shore and talked with him, and gave him a pair of ear-rings and drops for leave to come with us
This exchange — emotionally charged and ethnographically significant — is absent from Clark, Ordway, and Whitehouse alike. Whether the other narrators considered it too private to record, or simply did not witness it, Gass’s willingness to commit it to paper marks him as the most attentive observer of interpersonal incident on this date.
Clark’s Two Versions and the Captain’s Eye
Clark, characteristically, produced two versions of the entry — a field note and a fuller journal account. Both share his habit of geographical observation: he notes hills on the larboard side that resemble “a hiped rough house” (in the field note) and “a house with a hiped roof” (in the journal). This architectural simile is uniquely Clark’s; neither Ordway nor Gass attempts visual description of the landforms, though Ordway notes “Barron hills on the South Side.”
Clark also alone records the social texture of the evening visit:
Those people are much pleased with my black Servent Their womin verry fond of carressing our men
York’s reception among the Arikara is a recurring theme in Clark’s journals during this period, and his attention to it reflects both his proprietary interest and his recognition that York’s presence was, for the Arikara, among the more remarkable features of the expedition. Gass alludes glancingly to the same sociability — “They gave us some meat and appeared very glad to see us” — but without Clark’s specifics.
Whitehouse’s Silence and the Editorial Note
Whitehouse’s entry for October 15 is the most striking in what it does not say. The surviving manuscript shows that his entries from October 10 through 15 were crossed out with pen-marks, and the editorial apparatus accompanying the published journal observes that Whitehouse’s entries during this stretch are perfunctory — at one point concluding a day with the bare phrase “nothing else extraordinary hapened this day.” For October 15 itself, Whitehouse offers only:
rained all last night. we Set off eairly
The editorial note in the Wisconsin Historical Collections edition, reflecting on a related court-martial of the soldier Newman, draws attention to a broader pattern: that Gass and Ordway, who served on the court, recorded such matters minimally, and that Whitehouse’s brevity is part of the same reticence. Whether through fatigue, lack of literary ambition, or deliberate restraint, Whitehouse’s October 15 entry registers the weather and nothing else — a baseline against which the comparative richness of Clark, Ordway, and Gass becomes more visible.
Patterns in the Record
The four journals together demonstrate the stratified nature of the expedition’s documentary record. Clark, as a captain, writes with authority and breadth, attending to geography, diplomacy, and the social dynamics of contact. Ordway, the senior sergeant, produces a competent and quantitative narrative. Gass, also a sergeant, captures the human and incidental — the only narrator to preserve Sacagawea’s encounter with the Arikara hunter. Whitehouse, the private, offers the thinnest record, his terseness itself a form of testimony about the daily exhaustion of the journey.
