August 25, 1805, a Sunday, with the expedition split. Four published journals in this corpus record the day: Meriwether Lewis and the sergeants John Ordway and Joseph Whitehouse on the Lemhi side, loading horses toward the mountains; William Clark to the west with a small party on the Salmon. No published Patrick Gass journal for this date survives in this corpus. The four pages show how far the same date can differ depending on which side of the divide a narrator stood — and how much a journal can omit.
Lewis and the delayed news
Lewis writes the longest entry, and the most agitated. After a noon halt, Toussaint Charbonneau “mentioned to me with apparent unconcern” that he expected the Indians from the Columbia camp the next day, on their way to the Missouri. The first chief had sent young men that morning; he and those with him would go down, and “leave me and my baggage on the mountain or thereabouts.” Lewis is out of patience that the interpreter sat on the news:
I was out of patience with the folly of Charbono who had not sufficient sagacity to see the consequencies which would inevitably flow from such a movement of the indians, and altho he had been in possession of this information since early in the morning when it had been communicated to him by his Indian woman yet he never mentioned it untill the after noon.
The relay from Sacagawea to her husband at dawn is preserved only here. Lewis calls the three chiefs, smokes, and asks whether they are “men of their words.” Cameahwait says he had done wrong, “induced to that measure from seeing all his people hungary,” but will “not in future be worse than his word.” A young man is sent to countermand the order. Lewis gives the last deer to the women and children and “for my own part remained supperless.”
Clark on the Salmon
Clark records a quieter hardship. His party halts at a Shoshone camp and is fed boiled salmon and dried berries — “abt. half as much as I could eate”:
those people are kind with what they have but excessive pore & Durtey.
Three hunters out all day “saw one Deer, killed nothing.” Shannon arrives after dark with a beaver “which the Party suped on Sumptiously.” A party of women, one man, and several boys going down for berries yields the guide two salmon, “about half a Supper.” “One man verry Sick to day which detained us verry much.” Clark’s crisis is caloric, not diplomatic, and he says nothing of Lewis’s trouble because he does not yet know of it.
Lewis, writing the same evening, also summarizes Clark’s day. He names the sick man: “Winsor was taken very sick today.” He softens Clark’s “pore & Durtey” into “extreemly hospitable tho poor and dirty in the extreem,” and turns Shannon’s beaver, small fish, and two salmon into “a plentifull supper.”
Ordway and Whitehouse on Lewis’s trail
Ordway and Whitehouse, both with Lewis, file nearly parallel marches and then part on the crisis. Both have horses loaded, three deer, another deer later, about 15 miles, camp on the creek. Whitehouse adds “a little frost last night” and compresses the country to willow and “no timber of any acc! except pitch pine on the hills & tops of the mountains.” Ordway keeps what Whitehouse drops: wild hysop, golden rod, and prickley pears on the “level Sandy plain or desert”; wild onions; a burned upper prairie; a rapid where the creek cuts a bluff.
Ordway alone among the enlisted journalists captures the diplomatic emergency, from a different angle:
had sent an express across the M° for the remainder of their lodges to meet them that they all might go down the Missourie after the buffalow. that they could not Sterve but Cap! Lewis prevailed on the head chief to send one of his men to countermand the Orders
Ordway frames the Shoshone motive as hunger they “could not Sterve.” Lewis frames the same movement as a broken promise, then records Cameahwait saying the same thing in other words: his people were hungry. Whitehouse omits the episode entirely. He has the deer and the miles, not the chiefs.
Read alone, Lewis’s page is an afternoon scramble to keep horses and a crossing. Read with Ordway, the lodges across the mountain were starving, and the summons toward buffalo on the Missouri was survival logic. Read with Clark, hunger is on both sides of the divide — one beaver for Clark’s men, deer given away on Lewis’s. Charbonneau’s afternoon-long silence, preserved only by Lewis, is the hinge on which that Sunday turned.
