The expedition’s departure from the Shoshone lodges on August 31, 1805 was recorded by four men whose journals, read side by side, show how distinct sensibilities shaped a single shared march. Joseph Whitehouse, John Ordway, Patrick Gass, and William Clark each set down roughly the same sequence of events—an early start, salmon purchased at native weirs, a fleeing stranger, rough hills of white earth, a stony mountain shoulder along the river, and a camp in old Indian lodges up a creek—but their emphases diverge sharply.
Whitehouse and Ordway: A Shared Notebook
The closest pairing is between Whitehouse and Ordway, whose entries track each other phrase by phrase. Both describe the weirs in identical terms, both record buying “a nomber of fine” salmon, and both note the same ominous detail of stones along the mountain:
where the Stone lay one [up]on another and full of holes, So that it is allmost impossable for horses to pass without breaking their leggs. (Whitehouse)
where the Stone lay one on an other & holes so that the the horses could Scarsely git along without breaking their legs. (Ordway)
The verbal overlap is too close to be coincidence. Sergeant Ordway, the senior diarist of the two, almost certainly served as Whitehouse’s source—or the two men compared notes at camp. Whitehouse adds small independent touches (the men sent back to a moved Indian camp; the deer killed “at the edge of the evening”), while Ordway alone offers a more analytical aside on terrain: “the river bottoms narrow and verry much dryed up the Soil verry indifferent.” Ordway’s prose carries a sergeant’s habit of assessment; Whitehouse’s reads as a private’s transcription with personal embellishments.
The Strange Indian and the Flathead Question
Three of the four narrators record the encounter with a lone rider who fled at the sight of the corps. Whitehouse and Ordway both identify him cautiously as a suspected Flathead. Clark, writing with a captain’s broader political ear, supplies what the enlisted men could not have known—the man’s interpretation of the strangers:
I met an Indian on horse back who fled with great Speed to Some lodges below & informed them that the Enemis were Coming down, armd with guns &c.
Clark alone also records the smoke signals rising from the valleys: “Praries or open Valies on fire in Several places… The Countrey is Set on fire for the purpose of Collecting the different bands, and a Band of the Flatheads to go to the Missouri where They intend passing the winter near the Buffalow.” Where Whitehouse and Ordway saw a frightened stranger, Clark saw a continental movement of peoples toward the buffalo plains. The captain’s notebook operates at a different scale of inference.
Gass: The Bookkeeper’s Eye
Patrick Gass, whose published journal compresses August 31 and bleeds into September 1, supplies what no one else thinks to record: numbers. He alone tallies the herd—”27 horses and one mule”—and alone reckons the cost of the bargain just concluded with the Shoshones:
The first cost of the articles, which had been given for each horse, did not amount to more than from three to five dollars; so that the whole of them only cost about one hundred dollars.
Gass also notes the strategic decision the others omit—that the “old guide,” Toby, advised taking the north side of the Columbia drainage rather than the south. This is information Clark would have known but did not write down on this date; Gass, perhaps reconstructing from later memory for his published edition, preserves the council’s reasoning. His later entry for September 1 introduces the celebrated detail of York’s sore feet (“Capt. Clarke’s blackman’s feet became so sore that he had to ride on horseback”), a humanizing observation absent from the captains’ own pages.
Patterns of Witness
Read together, the four entries illustrate a consistent division of labor among expedition journalists. Clark records intelligence and intention; Gass records logistics, costs, and the practical decisions of leadership; Ordway provides a sergeant’s measured terrain assessment; Whitehouse follows Ordway closely while noting domestic details of camp and hunt. None contradicts the others on the basic itinerary—roughly twenty-two miles down the Lemhi and up a tributary creek to a camp in abandoned lodges—but each reveals what his rank, role, and temperament trained him to see.
