The 22 September 1804 entries from Patrick Gass, John Ordway, Joseph Whitehouse, and William Clark converge on a single landmark: Régis Loisel’s cedar-built trading fort on one of the Three Sisters islands, where the captains paused to inspect a recently abandoned Euro-American outpost in Teton Sioux country. The four accounts—remarkably similar in their measurements and phrasing—offer a case study in how the expedition’s enlisted journalists shared information, while Clark’s parallel field and elaborated notes preserve a wholly different register of observation.
A Shared Template Among the Sergeants and Privates
The descriptions by Gass, Ordway, and Whitehouse are so closely aligned that textual dependence is unmistakable. All three give the picketed enclosure as “65 or 70 feet Square,” the pickets as “13½ feet” above ground, and the trading house as “45½ by 32½ feet,” divided into four equal apartments. Ordway, whose entry is the longest and most technically detailed, appears to have served as the source—or to have shared a source—with the others.
Ordway alone preserves the construction details that elevate his account into the most thorough description of Loisel’s Fort aux Cèdres now extant:
this Tradeing house is built of ceeder high and covered with hughn [hewed] guttered ceeder, in the winter they cover them over with Buffaloe hides which answer a Good purpose, the chimneys built with Stone Clay & Wood
Gass compresses the same information into a tidier, more publishable prose—unsurprising given that his journal was the first to reach print. Where Ordway lists “one for Merchantise one for a common hall, one for peltery,” Gass renders the four rooms as “one for goods, one to trade in, one to be used as a common hall, and the other for a family house.” Whitehouse follows Gass’s wording almost exactly (“one for a common hall one to trade in and one for a famaly house”), suggesting either direct copying or a shared intermediate draft. Whitehouse, however, drops Ordway’s peltery presses and the buffalo-hide roofing entirely.
Clark’s Divergent Eye
William Clark, writing as commanding officer rather than as journal-keeper of the ranks, produces an entry that barely overlaps with the sergeants’ template. He gives no picket height, no room dimensions, no inventory of apartments. Instead, Clark fixes the site geographically—”Cedar Island 1½ M. long & 1 M. wide”—and records the latitude by meridian altitude as “44° 11′ 33″ N.”
Clark also notices what the others omit: the Indigenous landscape surrounding the fort. He writes:
about this Fort I saw numbers of Indians Temporary Lodges, & horse Stables, all of them round and to a point at top, I observed also numbers of Cotton Trees fallen for the purpose of feeding their horses on the Bark of the limbs of those trees which is Said to be excellent food for the horses
This ethnographic detail—the conical lodges, the horse stables, the cottonwood-bark fodder—appears in none of the enlisted journals. Ordway notes only that “their is Indian camps for a large distance about this place,” while Gass and Whitehouse mention only an “old Indian camp” downstream where the dog poles were found. Where the sergeants measured the fort, Clark read the country.
Dog Poles and the Ethnographic Footnote
The detail of the “dog poles”—lodgepoles repurposed by the expedition as setting poles—appears in Gass, Ordway, and Whitehouse but not in Clark’s entry for this date. Gass explains the term most fully:
the reason they are called dog poles, is because the Indians fasten their dogs to them, and make them draw them from one camp to another loaded with skins and other articles
Whitehouse echoes the explanation almost word-for-word, while Ordway frames it as hearsay (“we are informed that the Indians tie theirs dogs to these poles”). The convergence of phrasing again points to shared composition or copying among the enlisted journalists, with Ordway’s “we are informed” hinting that the original source may have been an oral briefing—possibly from Drouillard or one of the engagés—rather than direct observation.
Two Registers of the Same Day
Read together, the four entries demonstrate the expedition’s bifurcated documentary practice. The sergeants and privates produced architectural inventory and ethnographic anecdote in nearly interchangeable language, suggesting a culture of shared notes after the day’s march. Clark, by contrast, recorded what an officer responsible for mapping and diplomacy needed: latitude, island dimensions, the visible signs of Sioux trade and horse culture. Loisel’s fort survives in the historical record largely because Ordway measured it—but the Indigenous economy that surrounded it survives because Clark looked past the pickets.
