The August 9, 1805 entries cluster around two events along the Jefferson River near present-day Dillon, Montana: the return of George Shannon, lost three days on Wisdom River, and the departure of Meriwether Lewis with Drouillard, Shields, and McNeal on an overland reconnaissance to locate the Shoshone. All five journalists log both events, but the texture each preserves differs sharply.
Lewis’s Private Preparation
Only Lewis himself records what he did during the morning halt. While the canoes worked their way upriver, he walked ahead to a point where he expected to meet them, and used the unexpected leisure for a sober task:
by this means I acquired leasure to accomplish some wrightings which I conceived from the nature of my instructions necessary lest any accedent should befall me on the long and reather hazardous rout I was now about to take.
This is the day’s most consequential sentence, and no other narrator preserves it. Lewis is putting his affairs in order before crossing the Continental Divide with three men. Clark, writing tersely from camp, notes only that he himself would have taken the trip “had I have been able to march, from the rageing fury of a turner on my anckle musle” — a detail Lewis omits entirely. Read together, the two captains’ entries reveal a quiet calculation: Clark is incapacitated, Lewis is going alone into unknown country, and Lewis is writing what may amount to contingency instructions.
Shannon’s Return, Told Four Ways
The reappearance of George Shannon, lost since the canoes mistakenly ascended Wisdom River, draws the most attention from the enlisted journalists. Ordway and Whitehouse give nearly identical accounts — Whitehouse’s dependence on Ordway is again on display. Both report Shannon “had been lost 3 days,” both list “3 buck Deer” or “3 buck Skins,” both note he brought “a little meat.” Whitehouse substitutes “goat” for Ordway’s “deer” in the breakfast detail, a small divergence in an otherwise traced text.
Lewis alone reconstructs Shannon’s reasoning from the inside: Shannon had returned to the forks, marched one day up Wisdom River, concluded the party could not have ascended a stream so unnavigable, and then doubled back. Lewis adds the human observation that Shannon “had lived very plentifully this trip but looked a good deel worried with his march.” Gass, by contrast, mentions only that “one of the hunters came to us who had been out since the morning the canoes went up the north branch by mistake” — declining even to name him.
The Naming Problem
Ordway and Whitehouse both record a naming detail that has puzzled later editors. Both write that the captains called the north fork “Sensable River” — Ordway explains,
because we were Sensable of it
— apparently a sergeants’-mess joke about the punishing navigation of what the captains officially named Wisdom. Gass gives the official roster cleanly: Jefferson, Madison, Gallatin, Philosophy, Wisdom, Philanthropy. The discrepancy suggests the enlisted men were working from gossip rather than from the captains’ formal designations, or that an alternate name briefly circulated before being suppressed. Whitehouse’s manuscript shows the relevant sentence struck through, evidence of post-hoc correction.
The Country Itself
Gass is the day’s best topographer, describing the narrow quarter-mile passage where the river cuts through a mountain — a feature the others pass over. He also notes a leaking canoe hauled out and caulked at noon, a maintenance detail absent elsewhere. Ordway and Whitehouse both record the curious observation that the prairie “will Shake for Some distance around a man when he walks on it,” speculating it would make “good turf to burn” — a frontier assessment of peat that neither captain bothers with.
On game, all five agree it is scarce. Clark’s summary is the bluntest: “game of every kind Scerce.” Lewis records two antelope killed on his overland march; the river party’s hunters bring in only two more. The expedition is moving into country that will not feed it, on the eve of a divide crossing whose outcome Lewis is privately preparing not to survive.
