The expedition’s encounter with the Flathead Salish at Ross’s Hole on September 5, 1805 is one of the more richly documented diplomatic meetings of the journey, in part because three narrators of differing rank and literary habit each set down an account. Read together, the entries by William Clark, Sergeant John Ordway, and Private Joseph Whitehouse reveal not only the texture of the council itself but the chain of textual influence that shaped how enlisted men recorded what their officers did.
The Council and the Chain of Six Languages
All three writers fix on the same logistical marvel: that communication with the Salish required relay through a half-dozen tongues. Clark, the senior author, frames it as a difficulty of office:
we assembled the Chiefs & warriers and Spoke to them (with much dificuely as what we Said had to pass through Several languajes before it got in to theirs, which is a gugling kind of languaje Spoken much thro the fhrought)
Ordway and Whitehouse echo the observation almost verbatim — “all that we Say has to go through 6 languages before it gits to them,” Whitehouse writes, while Ordway gives “Six languages, and hard to make them understand.” The repetition strongly suggests that the enlisted men either compared notes with one another or absorbed the figure from a shared evening conversation in camp. The number six is precise enough that it almost certainly originated in the officers’ calculation — English to French (Drouillard or Charbonneau), French to Hidatsa (Sacagawea), Hidatsa to Shoshone, Shoshone to a Shoshone boy living among the Salish, and finally to Salish — and was then circulated.
Where the three diverge is in characterizing the Salish language itself. Clark’s ear hears “a gugling kind of languaje Spoken much thro the fhrought.” Ordway softens this into the more genteel “Stranges language of any we have ever yet seen,” then ventures the era’s favorite ethnographic guess: “we think perhaps that they are the welch Indians.” Whitehouse, working in the same idiom, writes that the Salish “appear to us to have an Empeddiment in their Speech or a brogue or bur on their tongue.” The shared phrase “brogue” between Ordway and Whitehouse — and the parallel “impediment” — again points to overlap, but Whitehouse omits the Welsh hypothesis, suggesting Ordway added his own speculative gloss to material the two had discussed.
Counting Horses, Counting Chiefs
The horse trade is recorded by all three, and the numbers track closely. Clark, who conducted the transactions, writes that he “purchased 11 horses & exchanged 7.” Ordway and Whitehouse both round up to twelve purchased — a small but telling discrepancy that hints they were estimating from observation rather than copying a ledger. Whitehouse adds a detail neither officer nor sergeant records: “we bought 1o or a Dozen pack Saddles from the natives.” Ordway corroborates the saddles in passing (“accommodated us with pack Saddles and chords”) but does not give a count. Whitehouse, often dismissed as the least literary of the journalists, here preserves a quartermaster’s detail his superiors omit.
On the diplomatic side, all three agree that four chiefs were created and given medals, and that two flags were distributed. Whitehouse notes the hoisting of “our large flag this morning,” a ceremonial framing absent from the other accounts. Ordway alone mentions the ravenous camp dogs that “eat several pair of the mens Moccasons” — the kind of domestic vexation a sergeant would feel before a captain would.
What Only Clark Sees
Clark’s entry is the only one to preserve substantive ethnographic description. He records the Salish self-designation — “They Call themselves Eoote-lash-Schute” — and estimates 450 lodges divided into bands ranging across the headwaters of the Columbia and Missouri. He describes hairstyles in careful gendered detail: men “Cewed with otter Skin on each Side falling over the Sholrs forward,” women wearing their hair “loose promisquisly” with long belted shirts to the ankle. He notes that the principal chief presented him with “a Dressed Brarow, otter & two Goat & antilope Skins” — gifts the enlisted men do not mention.
The register difference is instructive. Clark writes as the responsible ethnographer of record, cataloging political structure, dress, and gift exchange. Ordway and Whitehouse, working from the same day’s events, retain what struck enlisted ears: the strange phonology, the hungry dogs, the count of pack saddles, the lame horses swapped away. Taken together, the three entries form a layered record in which official ethnography, sergeant’s logistics, and private’s observation each preserve what the others let fall.
