The journals of 27 August 1805 capture the Lewis and Clark expedition at a hinge moment. Having abandoned hope of a navigable route down the Salmon, the captains needed horses — many of them — to cross the Bitterroots by land. Four narrators set down impressions of this day, but they were not all in the same place, nor watching the same things. Reading them together reveals how the expedition’s documentary record was assembled from overlapping but unequal vantage points.
Two Camps, Two Registers
John Ordway and Joseph Whitehouse were with Lewis at the upper Shoshone village, where the day’s diplomacy and commerce unfolded. Their entries run nearly parallel, suggesting either shared observation or, as is often the case in this stretch, Whitehouse working from Ordway’s notes. Both record the hoisting of the large flag, Lewis’s gift of flags to the head chief and the second chief, the settlement of accounts with the women who had helped portage gear over the Continental Divide, and Charbonneau’s purchase of a horse for a red cloak.
Ordway writes that the Shoshone women
are mostly employed gathering and drying seeds & roots for food, they git large quantities of fine black seed which they grind in to meal between two stones
Whitehouse echoes the observation almost verbatim, describing
a kind of Small black Seed not So large as buck wheat, which they dry and pound or rub between 2 Stone[s] and make a Sort of meal of it
The verbal closeness is characteristic of the Ordway–Whitehouse relationship throughout the journey. Yet Whitehouse departs at moments — adding service-berries and dried cherries to the list of foods, and noting that the fish "are not So red as the large Salmon," an ichthyological precision Ordway omits.
What Each Man Notices
Ordway is the most thorough on the day’s economy. He gives Lewis’s running tally — "8 or 9 horses this day" at "3 or 4 dollars worth of marchandize at the first cost" — and observes that the Shoshone "do not wish to part with any more of their horses without gitting a higher price." Whitehouse reports the figure as "7 or 8 horses," a small but typical discrepancy between the two enlisted journalists.
Both men describe the evening war dance, and both register the same comparative judgment: the Shoshone "did not dance so regular as the Indians on the Missourie." The repetition of this phrase across two journals is unlikely to be coincidence. Ordway, however, lingers longer over the gambling game the Shoshone played afterward, comparing it to "playing butten" and remarking with something close to admiration:
they risk all the property they git for their horses or Some of them but it does not trouble them they appear to be easy & well contented let the world go as it may.
Patrick Gass, traveling with Clark’s downriver detachment, supplies an entry of striking brevity. He notes flax in the bottoms and a sage or hyssop "as high as a man’s head" — botanical details neither Ordway nor Whitehouse records — but reports of the day’s hunt only that the men "had killed nothing but a fish." His final sentence carries the day’s anxiety: "We lodged here again all night, but heard nothing from Captain Lewis."
Clark’s Hunger
William Clark’s entry, written the same day from the same detachment as Gass’s, is the bleakest of the four. While Lewis trades for horses and Ordway watches gamblers, Clark is taking stock of starvation:
Those Pore people are here depending on what fish They Can Catch, without anything else to depend on; and appere Contented, my party hourly Complaining of their retched Situation and doubts of Starveing in a Countrey where no game of any kind except a fiew fish can be found
The juxtaposition is sharp. The Shoshone, in Clark’s telling, "appere Contented" with their lean diet — a near-mirror of Ordway’s observation that the gamblers "appear to be easy & well contented" — while Clark’s own men complain hourly. Clark notes with evident relief that an Indian brought five salmon to camp, "two of which I purchased which afforded us a Supper."
Read across the four narrators, 27 August 1805 illustrates how the expedition’s record depends on the writer’s location and temperament. Lewis’s camp produces commerce and ceremony; Clark’s produces hunger and waiting. The enlisted journalists Ordway and Whitehouse share text but diverge in detail; Gass economizes; Clark, alone among the four, lets the discomfort of his men onto the page.
