The journals of Joseph Whitehouse and John Ordway for September 4, 1805, run so closely in parallel that they invite direct comparison line by line. Both enlisted men open with nearly identical sensory details — frozen moccasins, snow-covered mountains, two mountain sheep spotted by a hunter — before tracing the descent from the Bitterroot divide into the valley where the expedition would meet the Salish. Yet within this shared framework, each narrator preserves details and interpretations the other omits, and Ordway in particular ventures an ethnographic speculation that has become one of the more curious passages in the expedition record.
Parallel Hardship on the Divide
The morning’s suffering is rendered in almost matching phrases. Whitehouse writes that
the morning clear but verry cold our mockersons froze hard. the mountains covred with Snow.
Ordway echoes:
the ground covred with frost our mockasons froze the mountains covred with snow.
Both men note the 8 o’clock departure, the snow that kep on our mockisons
(Whitehouse) or lay over our mockasons in places
(Ordway), and the ache of cold fingers in identical phrasing. This degree of overlap suggests the two sergeants either compared notes at day’s end or drew on a shared oral rehearsal of the day’s events around the evening fire — a pattern visible elsewhere in their journals.
The differences are instructive. Ordway records a practical detail Whitehouse misses: the men
thoughed our Sailes by the fire to cover the loads
before setting out, and he specifies the meager ration — a little pearched corn to eat.
Whitehouse simply notes they ascended without any thing to eat.
Conversely, Whitehouse alone identifies the timber as bolsom fer
in the thicket where the men killed a dozen pheasants, and he alone observes the considerable of large pitch pine in the valley
at day’s end. Whitehouse’s eye for vegetation is consistent across his journal; Ordway tends toward logistics and numbers.
The Salish Reception
Both narrators describe the welcome at the encampment of roughly forty lodges with striking consistency. Whitehouse reports that the Salish
Spread a white robe over them and put their arms around their necks, as a great token of friend-ship.
Ordway corroborates:
they gave them each a white robe of dressed skins, and spread them over their Shoulders and put their arms around our necks instead of Shakeing hands as that is their way.
Ordway’s gloss — instead of Shakeing hands
— is the more analytical phrasing, framing the gesture as a cultural substitution for an Anglo-American norm. Whitehouse renders it as a token of friendship without comparison.
On the herd, the two agree closely: between 400 and 500 horses grazing in view. Whitehouse calls them well looking horses
; Ordway hedges, they look like tollarable good horses the most of them.
Both describe the Salish as light-complexioned and well clothed in mountain sheep, deer, and buffalo skins, and both record the gift of dried serviceberries, cherries, and roots — Ordway adding the detail that the fruit was pounded and dryed in Small cakes.
The Welsh Indian Theory
The most striking divergence comes when Ordway turns ethnographer. After noting the unusual sound of Salish speech, he writes:
they have the most curious language of any we have seen before, they talk as though they lisped or have a bur on their tongue, we suppose that they are the welch Indians if their is any Such from the language.
This is a direct reference to the long-circulating myth of a lost Welsh-speaking tribe descended from the medieval prince Madoc — a legend Thomas Jefferson himself took seriously enough to inquire about. Whitehouse, by contrast, makes no such speculation in this entry, though the curated record indicates he too remarked on the speech impediment-like quality of Salish elsewhere. Ordway’s willingness to advance the Welsh hypothesis marks him, on this day, as the more interpretively ambitious of the two.
A small numerical discrepancy is worth flagging: Whitehouse estimates the camp at about 40 lodges
without giving a population, while Ordway writes about 40 lodges and I Suppose about 30 persons
— almost certainly a slip of the pen for 300, given the horse count and lodge number. Such transcription errors are a useful reminder that even closely parallel journals require cross-checking. Together, the two accounts preserve a fuller picture of the Ross’s Hole encounter than either could alone.
