September 15, 1805 finds the Corps of Discovery laboring up the dividing ridge between the North and Middle forks of the Clearwater River, correcting a navigational error that had taken them down into the canyon of the Kooskooskee the day before. Four narrators — Clark, Ordway, Gass, and Whitehouse — leave accounts of the ascent, and their differences reveal as much about rank, literacy, and journal-keeping habits as they do about the day itself.
Clark’s Catalog of Damage
Clark, as captain, produces the longest and most administratively detailed entry. He tracks the topography with a surveyor’s eye — "the road leaves the river to the left and assends a mountain winding in every direction" — and then turns to an inventory of losses. His own baggage horse, he reports, slipped:
The one which Carried my desk & Small trunk Turned over & roled down a mountain for 40 yards & lodged against a tree, broke the Desk the horse escaped and appeared but little hurt
Ordway records the same general disaster among the pack train but without identifying whose horse fell, writing that "Some of our horses fell backwards and roled 20 or 30 feet among the rocks, but did not kill them." The numerical discrepancy — Ordway’s 20–30 feet versus Clark’s 40 yards — is characteristic: Clark, attentive to the loss of his own writing desk, measures the fall more precisely. Gass and Whitehouse omit the rolling horses entirely.
Clark also alone notices the cause of the deforestation on the southern slopes — "falling timber which had falling from dift. causes i e. fire & wind" — a piece of ecological reasoning none of the enlisted men attempt. Ordway notes the blowdown ("the timber had been mostly blown down") but does not speculate about fire.
The Colt, the Soup, and the Snow
The day’s most memorable detail — the killing of a colt for food — surfaces unevenly across the four journals. Whitehouse states it plainly: "the men in jeneral So hungry that we killed a fine Colt which eat verry well." Clark refers obliquely to "the remnt. of our Colt" being cooked at the snowy summit camp, suggesting the animal had been killed earlier and was now being finished. Ordway, strikingly, does not mention the colt at all in the surviving text, recording only that the men "drank a little portable Soup and lay down without any thing else to Satisfy our hunger" — though the editorial footnote in his published journal supplies the colt and notes that the party named the last creek passed Killed-colt Creek. Gass, who reports four deer killed by the hunters at midday, omits the colt entirely, perhaps because his party had eaten better than the others.
The water problem unites three of the four accounts. Gass writes that the party "could find no place to encamp until late at night," while Ordway records that "we travvelled untill after dark in hopes to find water, but could not find any" and resorted to melting snow. Clark confirms the same expedient: "we melted the Snow to drink, and Cook our horse flesh to eat." Whitehouse, oddly, says nothing about the water shortage and instead focuses on weather — "Several light Showers of rain and a little hail. Several claps of Thunder" — meteorological detail the others omit.
Register and Botanical Attention
Gass writes in the most polished prose, almost certainly because his journal was edited for publication in 1807. His observation that the trail is "much travelled by the natives, who come across to the Flathead river to gather cherries and berries" supplies ethnographic context absent from the other three. Whitehouse and Ordway both note the conifers — Whitehouse identifying "tall Strait Siprass [Cypress] or white ceeder" and Ordway "tall handsome white ceeder and Spruce pine" — but Ordway’s phrasing is closer to a field naturalist’s, while Whitehouse’s hedging "Cypress or white ceeder" reflects an untrained eye reaching for a familiar name.
Distance estimates diverge sharply: Gass claims 23 miles, Clark only 12, and Whitehouse leaves a blank in his manuscript. The gap between Gass and Clark — nearly double — is too large to attribute to measurement error alone and may reflect Gass writing up the entry retrospectively from memory.
Taken together, the four entries demonstrate how a single day’s events refract through four different journal-keeping practices: Clark the administrator-surveyor, Gass the polished retrospective narrator, Ordway the steady field observer, and Whitehouse the irregular noter of weather and food.
