September 16, 1804, was a planned halt. After passing the White River, the party came to on the larboard shore about a mile and a quarter above a small creek, and resolved to lie by that day and the next. Four published journals record the pause: Meriwether Lewis, William Clark, John Ordway, and Joseph Whitehouse. Patrick Gass has no published journal for this date in this corpus. The White River scout he made with Reubin Fields survives here only as Lewis, Clark, and Whitehouse report it.
Lewis the naturalist, Clark the quartermaster
Lewis names the halt. They land at half after seven, a mile and a quarter above a creek “which we named Corvus, in consequence of having kiled a beatiful bird of that genus near it.” Baggage is wet from three days of rain; the boat is too heavy. They will dry the loads and shift part of them into the red perogue, now to go on to winter quarters instead of returning downriver. Lewis and Clark each kill a buck on landing. Then Lewis turns to a tree:
a small species of white oak which is loaded with acorns of an excellent flavor very little of the bitter roughness of the nuts of most species of oak, the leaf of this oak is small pale green and deeply indented, it seldom rises higher than thirty feet is much branched
The acorn cup is fringed at the edges and holds about half the nut. The acorns are falling, and he argues from that: the deer are tame and many here because they are fond of the mast, as are buffalo, elk, bear, turkeys, ducks, pigeons, even wolves. Three hunters add eight deer and two buffalo; the buffalo are so poor they take only tongues, skins, and marrow bones. Clouds block observations.
Clark writes the same halt as work. Two drafts cover drying wet things, cleaning lockers and bales, and loading the perogue they had meant to send back, “finding the water too Shoal.” He issues a flannel shirt to each man and powder to those who have spent theirs. Where Lewis describes oak cups, Clark notes that the buffalo meat was “too pore to eat” and that the skins were kept to cover the perogue. He records pine burs and birch sticks in the driftwood up White River — timbered country neither party has seen. At the mouth he notes three gentle rises and a “butifull Situation for a town.”
Ordway’s kill-list, Whitehouse’s camp name
Ordway came on to find a place to dry and arrange affairs and refresh the party. He leaves the large creek on the south side unnamed — a blank in the manuscript — while Lewis supplies Corvus. Camp is on the south side “in a handsome bottom of thin Timbered land”
lately burned over by the natives, it had grown up again with Green Grass which looked beautiful
That burned bottom is Ordway’s. Lewis uses fire later, on the White River plains the scouts describe. Ordway then lists the meat: Clark one deer, Lewis one, G. Drewyer one; Collins, coming in with the horse, two deer (one yesterday, one this morning); Battest Decamps a buffalo; Roie a fawn; Lewis a buffalo. Skins saved to cover the perogue. The large red perogue loaded out of the batteau, to continue to the Mandan.
Whitehouse is brief and names the camp as no one else does:
Came 4 miles and Camped at a beautiful bottom wood with thin timber named pleasant Camp
His four miles does not match Clark’s mile and a quarter. His game list is one line — buffalo, elk, deer, goats, “one magpy.” That magpie is the nearest enlisted match for Lewis’s bird of the genus Corvus. Whitehouse preserves a kill and a camp name; Lewis preserves the Latin; Clark, in this day’s drafts, names neither Corvus nor Pleasant Camp.
The White River scout, at second hand
Gass and Reubin Fields had been sent up the White the day before. Whitehouse records the return in a line: they “had killed i Deer.” Lewis has them back at four o’clock. They had followed the meanders about twelve miles, general course west; the water’s color, rapidity, and manner of running “resembled the Missouri presisely.” Level plains lately burnt, grass about three inches, vast herds in every direction. Clark quotes the two men on elm timber, islands and sands, beaver sign, buffalo, and — as he saw himself — pine burs and birch in the drift. No first-person Gass for September 16 is in this corpus.
The four entries are a botanical page, a cargo day, a hunting ledger, and a christening. The scout comes in only as reported speech. Few river miles, and a full record of a halt.
