The 12th of August 1805 stands as one of the expedition’s most dramatic geographic milestones: Meriwether Lewis, with a small advance party, crested Lemhi Pass and tasted the headwaters of the Missouri before gazing west onto an unbroken sea of mountains. Yet for the men still hauling canoes up the river below, the day was something else entirely — a wet, white-knuckled grind against a current that nearly claimed one of the large canoes. Three enlisted journalists left accounts of that struggle, and reading them side by side reveals how three men can witness the same events and produce three very different records.
Shared Source, Divergent Detail
The textual relationship between Whitehouse and Ordway is unmistakable. Both note that three hunters went out, both describe the current as “verry rapid,” both record the afternoon thunder shower at roughly the same hour, and — most tellingly — both report the same near-disaster in nearly identical phrasing. Whitehouse writes that “one of the large canoes was near turning over,” while Ordway records that “one of the large canoes was near turning over.” The verbatim agreement strongly suggests either shared note-taking at camp or one journalist consulting the other’s draft.
Yet Ordway is consistently the fuller observer. Where Whitehouse offers a serviceable summary, Ordway expands the frame:
Some of these rapids is deep and dangerous to pass up… we halted to dine, we had a hard Thunder Shower rained some time, we then proceeded on found pleanty of red and yallow currents along the Shores.
The currants — both the colors and the abundance — appear nowhere in Whitehouse or Gass. Ordway also specifies that the antelope killed the previous evening was taken aboard, and he names the campsite trees as cottonwoods on the larboard side. These are the small ethnographic and ecological details that make Ordway one of the expedition’s most reliable witnesses to daily texture.
Gass: The Carpenter’s Economy
Patrick Gass, whose published 1807 journal was the first account of the expedition to reach print, here exemplifies the compressed, almost telegraphic style that distinguishes him from his messmates. His full entry runs to a single sentence cluster:
three hunters were again sent out. A few drops of rain fell to-day. Our hunters killed 4 deer; and after making 12 miles we encamped on the North side.
Three points stand out. First, Gass renders the thunderstorm — which Whitehouse calls a “hard Thunder Shower” and Ordway describes as raining “some time” — as merely “a few drops.” Second, Gass reports four deer killed, while both Whitehouse and Ordway count three deer (Ordway adds a fawn, which may reconcile the totals). Third, only Gass supplies the day’s mileage; Whitehouse and Ordway both leave the figure as a blank space in their manuscripts, evidently intending to fill it in later from a more authoritative source. The blanks are themselves revealing: they show enlisted journalists working without immediate access to the captains’ chain or compass readings, and trusting that the official measurement would be available afterward.
The Hunters, the Antelope, and the Register of Risk
All three men attend to the hunters, but with different emphases. Whitehouse notes that the hunters had “seen Deer & a goat or antelope” — registering the sighting as news. Ordway, characteristically, closes the loop by recording that the antelope was actually killed the previous evening and brought aboard the next day. Gass omits the antelope entirely. The pronghorn, still a relatively novel animal to the party, clearly registered differently for different observers.
Most striking is the divergence in how each man frames danger. Ordway is explicit: the rapids are “deep and dangerous to pass up.” Whitehouse reports the near-capsize without editorializing. Gass omits the incident altogether. Whether Gass simply did not witness it, did not consider it noteworthy, or compressed it out of his entry on principle, the silence is itself a stylistic signature. His journal repeatedly downplays hardship in favor of forward motion and measurable accomplishment — a register that would serve him well when his account became, two years later, the expedition’s first public face.
Reading these three entries together, one sees the daily collaborative texture of expedition record-keeping: shared phrases, blank spaces awaiting official numbers, and three distinct sensibilities — Ordway’s expansive curiosity, Whitehouse’s mid-range narrative, and Gass’s carpenter-like economy — laboring side by side on the same river.
