September 6, 1805 marked a pivotal logistical transition for the Corps of Discovery. Having traded for forty pack horses and three colts from the Flathead Salish (the oote lash Shutes, in Clark’s rendering) at Ross’s Hole, the expedition prepared to climb northward while their hosts struck lodges and headed east toward the Three Forks of the Missouri to hunt buffalo. The three surviving journals from this date — by Sergeant John Ordway, Private Joseph Whitehouse, and Captain William Clark — present a striking case study in how rank, role, and individual curiosity shaped what each narrator chose to record.
Shared Skeleton, Divergent Flesh
Ordway and Whitehouse share a near-identical narrative spine, a pattern consistent throughout the expedition that suggests Whitehouse worked from Ordway’s notes or that both copied a common source. Compare the two on the day’s march:
we proceeded on soon crossed a large creek in this valley then Soon took the mountains… we went over a Mountain about 7 miles and descended down the Mountain on a creek and Camped. eat a little parched corn, light sprinkling of rain, through the course of this day. (Ordway)
we proceeded on our journey. crossed a large creek went over a mountain about 7 miles came down on the Same creek and Camped nothing to eat but a little pearched corn. on[e] hunter Stayed out all night. light Sprinklings of rain through the course of the day. (Whitehouse)
The phrasing — “about 7 miles,” “light sprinkling(s) of rain,” “parched corn” — is too close to be independent observation. Yet Whitehouse consistently expands where his interests run deeper, and his ethnographic commentary on this day is the most remarkable feature of the trio of entries.
Whitehouse and the Welsh Indian Hypothesis
Where Ordway records only logistics, Whitehouse pauses to engage one of the more curious intellectual currents of the early republic — the persistent rumor of a lost tribe of Welsh-descended Indians somewhere west of the Missouri:
we take these Savages to be the Welch Indians if their be any Such from the Language. So Cap: Lewis took down the names of everry thing in their Language, in order that it may be found out whether they are or whether they Sprang or origenated first from the welch or not.
This is a detail no other narrator on this date preserves with such directness. Clark notes only that he “took a Vocabiliary of the language,” without explaining the motive. Whitehouse alone records the speculative ethnological framework — likely encountered in conversation around the captains’ fire — that prompted the vocabulary list. The Salish language, with its distinctive consonant clusters, struck several expedition members as unlike any Native tongue they had heard, and the Welsh-Indian theory provided a ready (if entirely mistaken) explanation.
Clark’s Anxieties: Rivers, Theft, and Hunger
Clark, writing as commander, attends to matters his sergeants and privates can afford to ignore. He alone names the geographic structure of the valley — “all three forks Comeing together below our Camp” — and gives a course bearing of “N 30 W.” He alone notes that the river is “30 yds. wide Shallow & Stoney” and that the party crossed it “Several times.”
Most tellingly, Clark records an anxiety entirely absent from the enlisted men’s journals:
all our horses purchased of the oote lash Shutes we Secured well for fear of their leaveing of us, and watched them all night for fear of their leaving us or the Indians prosuing & Steeling them.
The double worry — that the newly purchased horses might wander back toward their familiar herd, or that the Salish might reconsider the trade and reclaim them — reveals the captain’s command-level calculation of risk. Ordway and Whitehouse note neither concern, though as sergeant of the guard Ordway would certainly have organized the watch Clark describes.
Clark also offers the bleakest account of the day’s provisions. Where the enlisted men report only “a little parched corn,” Clark catalogues the larder: “nothing to eate but berries, our flour out, and but little Corn, the hunters killed 2 pheasents only.” The captain’s view encompasses the dwindling stores; the privates’ view encompasses what was actually in the kettle.
Reading the Three Together
Read in parallel, the September 6 entries demonstrate the stratified information economy of the expedition. Whitehouse, copying Ordway, occasionally surfaces ethnographic detail picked up secondhand from the captains. Ordway records the day with a sergeant’s eye for marching order and miles. Clark alone integrates geography, diplomacy, supply, and security into a single command narrative. None of the three is sufficient by itself; together they reconstruct a richer departure from Ross’s Hole than any one journal preserves.
