The entries for September 2, 1805 capture one of the most physically punishing days of the entire transcontinental journey. Having departed the established Indian road that led toward the Missouri, the captains turned their party up an untracked west fork — the stream now known as the North Fork of the Salmon River — and into a tangle of timber, swamp, and rock that the enlisted men collectively christened “dismal Swamp.” Comparing the four surviving accounts reveals not only what happened but how the expedition’s writers worked: who borrowed phrasing from whom, who attended to natural detail, and who reported only the bare arithmetic of suffering.
Whitehouse and Ordway: Parallel Texts
The closeness between Joseph Whitehouse’s and John Ordway’s entries is unmistakable. Both open with the company loading horses and setting out “about 7 oClock,” both describe the route as “bad” with “thick bushes and logs,” and both fix the course as “N. E.” Whitehouse writes that
the pine and bolsom fer timber verry pleanty and thick up this Creek Some of the Pine is large enofe for boards
while Ordway records, in nearly identical sequence,
the pine and balsom fer timber tall and strait, and pleanty. Some of the pine is large enofe for canoes or boards &.C.
Both men also coin — or transcribe from a shared conversation around the fire — the name “dismal Swamp,” and both estimate the swamp’s length at six miles. The verbal parallels are too tight to be coincidence; one journalist almost certainly consulted the other, or both drew from a common nightly recitation among the enlisted men. Ordway, the orderly sergeant, is generally considered Whitehouse’s likelier source, and his slightly more polished syntax here supports that direction of borrowing.
Gass: The Tradesman’s Eye
Patrick Gass, whose journal would be the first published, frames the day in the idiom of a working carpenter. He alone specifies which pines are absent — “most beautiful tall straight pine trees of different kinds, except of white pine” — a distinction Whitehouse and Ordway do not draw. Gass also delivers the day’s most quotable line:
In the afternoon we had a good deal of rain, and the worst road (if road it can be called) that was ever travelled.
Where Whitehouse catalogs and Ordway lists, Gass editorializes. He is also the only narrator to mention that a son of the Shoshone guide, Old Toby, joined the party that day, and the only one to itemize the company’s shrinking provisions: “a small quantity of dried salmon, which we got from the natives is almost our whole stock.” Gass’s instinct for the social and logistical fact — guide’s son, food stores, unshod hooves — complements the enlisted men’s topographic reportage.
Clark: Command Compression
William Clark’s entry differs from the other three in almost every respect. He alone notes the decisive geographic moment of the day: “at 8 miles left the roade on which we were pursuing and which leads over to the Missouri.” This is the captain’s perspective — the expedition has just abandoned a known path. Clark also reports a markedly shorter distance, only five miles, against the thirteen claimed by Whitehouse, Gass, and Ordway; the discrepancy likely reflects the difference between Clark’s measured advance to the captains’ camp and the enlisted men’s count of the full ground covered, including the rear party that struggled in after dark.
Clark’s prose compresses the suffering into an almost legal inventory:
over rockey hill Sides where our horses were in pitial danger of Slipping to Ther certain distruction & up & Down Steep hills, where Several horses fell, Some turned over, and others Sliped down Steep hill Sides, one horse Crippeled & 2 gave out.
The enlisted men describe individual horses rolling “to the foot of the hills” (Whitehouse) and loads being carried up by hand; Clark abstracts the same events into a casualty count. Notably absent from his entry is any mention of “dismal Swamp” — the soldiers’ name for the place did not penetrate, or did not interest, the captain’s record.
Reading the Day Across Four Pens
Taken together, the four entries form a layered portrait that no single journal could supply. Ordway and Whitehouse preserve the men’s own naming and their attention to beaver sign and timber quality; Gass adds the carpenter’s species note, the guide’s son, and the haunting verdict on the road; Clark fixes the strategic departure from the Indian trail and tallies the cost in horseflesh. The convergence on thirteen miles among the enlisted journalists, against Clark’s five, is itself a useful caution for any researcher reconstructing the day’s geography: distance on this expedition was a function of who was counting, and from where.
