The entries for August 29, 1804 capture a single afternoon from three vantage points: Sergeant Patrick Gass, Private Joseph Whitehouse, and Captain William Clark. All three describe the same sequence of events — a stormy night, repairs to the pirogue, the dispatch of Colter after the missing Shannon, and the arrival across the river of a Sioux delegation guided in by Sergeant Pryor and the trader Pierre Dorion. Yet the three accounts diverge sharply in scope, in the sources of their information, and in what each narrator considered worth preserving.
A Shared Source, Three Different Filters
Gass and Whitehouse both report the Sioux party at “60 Indians” and locate the village “about 9 miles from the Missouri,” while Clark, writing from a position closer to Pryor and Dorion themselves, gives “about 70 Soues” and later “12 miles distant.” The numerical drift suggests that Gass and Whitehouse were drawing on the same secondhand account — likely Pryor’s initial report as it filtered through the camp — while Clark recorded a later, fuller debriefing.
The verbal parallels between Gass and Whitehouse are too close to be coincidental. Gass writes that the lodges “are made of dressed buffaloe and elk skins, painted red and white, and are very handsome.” Whitehouse echoes:
their Town was ab’ 9 miles from the Missouri, and consisted of 40 lodges, and built with dressed Buffelow Skins &c. painted different coulers &c.
Whitehouse’s “different coulers” is closer to Clark’s “Painted different Colour,” hinting that the enlisted men compared notes or drew from a common camp rumor that had already begun to standardize. Gass, the more polished writer of the two sergeants’ journals, smooths the report into a tidy sentence; Whitehouse retains the looser “&c. &c.” cadence of oral relay.
What Each Narrator Notices
Clark, drafting a formal speech for the next day’s council, devotes the bulk of his entry to ethnographic and diplomatic detail. He alone records the protocol of arrival — that Pryor’s party was met by men carrying a buffalo robe, intending to bear the captains ceremonially into camp:
they Came to meet them Supposeing Cap Lewis or my Self to be of the party intending to take us in a roabe to their Camp
In his second draft of the entry, Clark refines the moment further, citing Dorion’s intervention: “they were not the Owners of the Boats & did not wish to be Carried.” Neither Gass nor Whitehouse mentions the robe ceremony at all — a detail that would have required direct conversation with Pryor or Dorion, access the enlisted men did not have.
Clark also catalogs the lodge construction with an architect’s eye: “of a Conic form Covered with Buffalow Roabs Painted different Colours and all Compact & hand Somly arranged, covered all round an orpen part in the Center for the fire, with Buffalow roabs each Lodg has a place for Cooking detached.” Gass reduces this to “very handsome”; Whitehouse to “painted different coulers.”
Conversely, Gass alone offers a candid social judgment on the Sioux that the captains’ official record omits: “the women are homely and mostly old; but the young men likely and active.” This is the sergeant’s voice unmediated by diplomatic caution — a register Clark, conscious of his entries as state documents, avoids.
The Dog Feast and the Catfish
All three narrators record the killing of a dog, but with different framings. Gass calls it a “token of friendship.” Whitehouse omits it entirely from the surviving fragment. Clark, attentive to the meal as both ceremony and cuisine, notes in his second draft that the party “partook hartily and thought it good & well flavored” — a small ethnographic concession that the dog was actually eaten, not merely offered.
The catfish, meanwhile, appear in Gass and Whitehouse but not Clark. Gass praises them as “the best I have ever seen,” and Whitehouse echoes “pleanty of fine cat fish.” The captain, busy with his speech and the toe-rope of elk skin, lets the day’s fishing pass without comment — a reminder that the enlisted journals often preserve the texture of subsistence and weather that the command journals leave out.
Read together, the three entries form a layered record: Clark provides the diplomatic and ethnographic spine, Gass supplies the candid social observation and the soldier’s appetite, and Whitehouse offers the closest thing to a transcription of camp talk as it circulated on the evening of August 29.
