The expedition’s September 11, 1805 entries from Travelers’ Rest, near present-day Lolo, Montana, capture a single delayed afternoon’s march of roughly seven miles up the creek the captains had named for their recent campsite. Yet the four surviving accounts — by William Clark, Joseph Whitehouse, John Ordway, and Patrick Gass — diverge in ways that reveal how rank, literary ambition, and observational habit shaped the expedition’s documentary record.
Whitehouse and Ordway: A Shared Source
The closest textual kinship is between the enlisted men Whitehouse and Ordway, whose entries share not only structure but specific phrases and the same astronomical figure. Both record the latitude as 46° 48′ 28 8/10″ North, and both describe the painted tree in nearly identical terms. Ordway writes that the party
passed a large tree on which the natives had a number of Immages drawn on it with paint, a part of a white bear skin hung on Sd tree
Whitehouse’s version is barely distinguishable:
passed a tree on which was a nomber of Shapes drawn on it with paint by the natives. a white bear Skin hung on the Same tree. we Suppose this to be a place of worship among them.
The parallel suggests Whitehouse consulted Ordway’s sergeant’s journal — a known practice among the enlisted diarists — but Whitehouse adds an interpretive gloss (“a place of worship”) that Ordway withholds. Both men also note the peeled pines and explain them ethnographically: Ordway tersely observes that “the natives eat the enside bark,” while Whitehouse elaborates that the inner bark is mixed “with their dryed fruit to Eat” and adds that “the Choke cherries are pleanty.” Whitehouse, the more discursive writer, consistently expands what Ordway compresses.
Clark’s Strategic Geography
Clark’s journal, by contrast, ignores the painted tree, the bear skin, and the peeled pines entirely. As co-commander, his attention runs to terrain and route intelligence. He alone records that the party was
accompanied by the flat head or Tushapaws Indians
and that a Flathead guide volunteered information about a major fork joining from the right that “heads up against the waters of the Missouri below the Three forks” — a route with “a fine large roade” leading back toward known country. Clark also notes the departure of a restless Flathead companion who “thought proper to leave us and proceed on alone,” and explains the standing arrangement of “4 of the best hunters to go in advance.” Where Whitehouse and Ordway document a curious painted tree, Clark documents a usable map. His closing observation — “the mountains on the left high & Covered with Snow” — registers, with characteristic economy, the obstacle that would soon nearly destroy the expedition.
Gass: Compression and the Hunters’ Tally
Patrick Gass’s entry, published in 1807 and edited for a reading public, is the most compressed of the four. Gass omits the latitude, the painted tree, the peeled pines, the Flathead companions, and the snow on the mountains. What he keeps is the hunters’ arithmetic:
at noon we halted and they all came in, having killed an elk and a deer… our hunters came in, one of whom had killed a deer, and another had caught two mares and a colt, which he brought with him.
Gass’s distance estimate — “Having travelled 20 miles” — is also markedly larger than the seven miles reported by Clark, Ordway, and Whitehouse, a discrepancy likely produced by his journal’s later editorial preparation rather than field observation. Notably, Gass alone mentions the recovered mares and colt, a practical detail the others overlook.
What Each Narrator Sees
Read together, the four accounts triangulate the day’s events but emphasize different layers of experience. Clark sees geography and diplomacy; Ordway and Whitehouse, working in close textual conversation, see Indigenous land use and material culture; Gass sees the commissary. Only Whitehouse interprets the painted tree as religious, and only Ordway and Whitehouse explain the peeled pines — an ethnographic observation about cambium harvesting that Clark, despite his ethnographic interests elsewhere, did not record on this date. The convergence of detail across the enlisted men’s journals, set against the strategic selectivity of Clark’s, illustrates how the expedition’s documentary record was assembled in layers, with each narrator preserving what his peers let pass.
