The expedition’s first full day on the Lolo Trail produced four overlapping but distinct journal entries. Whitehouse, Gass, Ordway, and Clark all describe steep ascents, scarce water, exhausted horses, and a camp reached late at night on a cramped creek bank. Yet the entries differ enough in detail and emphasis to illuminate how the enlisted men, the sergeants, and the captain each processed a punishing day in the mountains.
Ordway and Whitehouse: Near-Identical Twins
The most arresting cross-narrator pattern on this date is the close textual kinship between Sergeant Ordway and Private Whitehouse. Their entries align almost phrase by phrase. Whitehouse writes that the party
proceeded on crossed 2 more creeks, and assended a high rough mountain rockey & a verry rough trail to follow.
Ordway records the parallel sequence:
proceeded on crossed 2 more creeks ascended up a mountain on a high ridge a verry bad trail rough and rockey.
Both report the hunters’ tally as “4 Deer and a pheasant” (Whitehouse spells it “fessent”), both give the day’s distance as 17 miles, both place the late arrival at “10 oClock,” and both note that the camp offered “Scarsely” or “Scarcely” any feed for the horses. The shared phrasing strongly suggests one journal was consulted in drafting the other, or that both men compared notes in camp — a recurring feature of the enlisted journals that scholars have long observed. The principal divergence is Whitehouse’s added flourish about “high Mountains to the South of us covred with Snow, which appears to lay their all the year round,” a sweeping landscape observation absent from Ordway’s more procedural entry.
Gass: A Day Behind, or a Different Geography
Patrick Gass’s entry for September 12 reads strangely against the others. Where Whitehouse, Ordway, and Clark are clearly climbing into the mountains along the creek the captains had named Travelers’ Rest, Gass describes crossing “the Flathead river, about 100 yards wide, and which we called Clarke’s river” and entering “beautiful plains.” His hunters bring in “3 wild geese” and “3 deer” — figures that match no other narrator. Gass’s distance, 19 miles, also disagrees with the 17 miles reported by both Ordway and Whitehouse.
The discrepancy likely reflects the well-known fact that Gass’s published journal was edited and rearranged by David McKeehan in 1807, and Gass himself may have been a day behind in his dating during this stretch. Whatever the cause, his entry is a useful caution: superficially authoritative published accounts can drift from the consensus of the field journals.
Clark: Terrain, Indians, and Command Perspective
Captain Clark’s entry stands apart in register and content. Where the sergeants and privates count deer and miles, Clark catalogs landscape and infrastructure. He notes “an old Indian encampment a Swet house Covered wthh earth,” identifies the timber as “Short & long leaf Pine Spruce Pine & fur,” and observes that
the Indians have pealed a number of Pine for the under bark which they eate at certain Seasons of the year, I am told in the Spring they make use of this bark.
This ethnobotanical detail — peeled ponderosa pines used as a seasonal food source by the Nez Perce and Salish — appears in none of the other three journals. Clark also offers a route-finder’s critique absent from the enlisted accounts, remarking that the “most intolerable road on the Sides of the Steep Stoney mountains… might be avoided by keeping up the Creek.” His hunters’ return is the most meager of the four reports: “only one Pheasent this after noon,” with the party and horses “much fatigued.”
The contrast is instructive. Clark, responsible for navigation and Indian relations, records what a commander needs to remember: trail alternatives, indigenous land use, timber types. Ordway and Whitehouse, responsible for keeping a daily log, record the rhythms of march, meal, and miles. Gass, filtered through a publisher, drifts furthest from the day’s actual events. Together, the four entries reconstruct September 12, 1805, more fully than any one of them could alone.
