The expedition’s passage of the Cheyenne River — rendered variously as “Chirn,” “ashea or dog,” and “Chyenne” — and the subsequent encounter with a French trader’s young assistant produced four journal entries on October 1, 1804 that diverge dramatically in length and ambition. Read together, they offer a useful case study in how the corps’ narrators allocated attention, and in how Clark’s role as principal geographer and ethnographer shaped what the others did not need to write down.
Compression and Echo Among the Enlisted Journalists
The shortest entry belongs to Joseph Whitehouse, who compresses the day into four lines:
Set off eairly. acloudy morning fare wind. we Sailed on rapidly. at 9 oClock we passed dog River which comes in on S. S.. we Camped on a Sand bar in the middle of the river, a french trador came to us from the S. Shore.
Patrick Gass’s entry is only marginally fuller, but the verbal overlap with Whitehouse is striking. Gass writes that the morning “was cloudy but the wind fair and we sailed rapidly,” that “At 9 we passed the river De Chirn, or Dog river,” and that the party “encamped on one [sand bar] in the middle of the river.” The shared phrasing — cloudy morning, fair wind, sailing rapidly, the 9 o’clock passage, the mid-river sandbar camp — suggests either common conversational shorthand among the sergeants or direct borrowing. Gass adds the gloss “De Chirn, or Dog river” and notes that the French trader “came over and remained with us all night,” a small social detail Whitehouse omits.
John Ordway, by contrast, expands. Where Gass and Whitehouse note “sand bars,” Ordway describes the labor: “we had some difficulty to pass,” “dragged our Boat over a verry Shallow channel,” the wind blowing “so hard that it was difficult to find the channel.” He also preserves the meal structure of the day — breakfast at 9, a two-hour delay, dinner at 2 — and identifies the visitor more precisely as “a young french man who lived with Mr Valley a trader.” Ordway alone among the enlisted journalists names the trader.
Clark’s Dossier on the Cheyenne and the Black Hills
William Clark’s entry dwarfs the others, and its bulk is almost entirely intelligence harvested from the trader Valle (Ordway’s “Valley”). Clark records the Cheyenne as “about 400 yards wide dischargeing but little water for a R. of its Size,” navigable to the Black Hills. He then transcribes what amounts to a debriefing:
This Mr. Vallie informed us he wintered last winter 300 Legus up the Chyemne River under the Black mountains, he Sais the River is rapid and bad to navagate, it forks 100 Leagus up the N. fork enters the Black mountain 40 Leagues above the forks…
Clark gathers a remarkable inventory: that the “Coat Nur or Black m.” is high enough to “retain Snow all Summer” and is timbered “principally pine”; that the mountains hold “Great number of goats and a kind of anamal with verry large horns about the Size of a Small Elk” — almost certainly bighorn sheep — alongside “White Bear”; that there are no beaver on the Cheyenne itself but “great numbers in the mountains”; and that “The Chyenne Nation has about 300 Lodges hunt the Buffalow, Steel horses from the Spanish Settlements, which they doe in 1 month.” He closes with a naturalist’s aside on grouse anatomy: “the Toes of their feet So constructed as to walk on the Snow, and the Tail Short with 2 long Stiff feathers in the middle.”
None of this geographic or zoological information appears in the other three journals. Gass and Whitehouse register only the trader’s presence; Ordway names him but does not pursue him for information. The division of labor is functional: the captains conducted the interview, and Clark archived its substance.
The Sandbar as Shared Refrain
One detail unites all four narrators — the sheer impassability of the river bottom. Gass calls the bars “so numerous, that we had great difficulty to get along.” Ordway describes dragging the boat. Whitehouse simply camps on one. Clark, after his ethnographic excursus, throws up his hands: “Sand bars are So noumerous, that it is impossible to discribe them, & think it unnecessary to mention them.” That Clark feels obliged to declare the topic exhausted, even as his subordinates dutifully mention it, is a small index of how his journal was already functioning as the master document — synthesizing, evaluating, and editorially dismissing what the others recorded as a matter of course.
