The entries of September 1, 1805, capture the Corps of Discovery laboring through the rugged country north of the Lemhi-Salmon junction, climbing and descending mountains its members would remember as among the worst they ever traversed. Four narrators — Joseph Whitehouse, John Ordway, Patrick Gass, and William Clark — recorded the day, and the surviving texts offer an unusually clear window into how the journals were drafted, shared, and shaped by rank and audience.
Parallel Pens: Whitehouse and Ordway
The closest textual relationship lies between Whitehouse and Ordway, whose entries align almost phrase by phrase. Both men describe crossing “Several large creeks the water of which is verry cold,” both note “considerable of pine & cotton timber,” and both record finding “a great pleanty of Servis berrys which are verry Sweet and good at this time.” The convergence continues through the day’s incidents: three men dispatched to a creek-mouth Indian camp returning with “about 25 pound” of salmon, hunters who “killed a Deer and wounded two bear,” and an evening of gathering and boiling choke cherries that “eat verry well.”
Both also report the same distance:
Camped after coming 23 miles this day & Camped a little before night on account of its raining. (Whitehouse)
at dusk we Came 23 miles this day. (Ordway)
Such overlap is consistent with the well-established pattern in which Whitehouse, a private, drew heavily on Sergeant Ordway’s journal — or the two compared notes nightly. Whitehouse, however, adds his own observations, including the vivid simile that the party “descended a Mountain nearly as Steep as the roof of a house” and the small domestic detail that “we had 2 [lodges] at camp to Sleep in.” Ordway, by contrast, opens with a piece of trail drama Whitehouse omits: “at the first put one of the horses fell backward and roled over, but did not hurt him much.”
Gass’s Divergence — A Different Day Entirely
Sergeant Patrick Gass produces a markedly different account. Where Ordway and Whitehouse log 23 miles, Gass writes that the party “went 13 miles and encamped; but some of the men did not come up till late at night.” The discrepancy may reflect a copying error, a different reckoning of the day’s start, or simply the strung-out condition of the column on such terrain. Gass alone foregrounds the suffering of the unshod horses:
We went on with difficulty on account of the bushes, the narrowness of the way and stones that injured our horses feet, they being without shoes… In going up these ascents the horses would sometimes fall backwards, which injured them very much; and one was so badly hurt that the driver was obliged to leave his load on the side of one of the hills.
Gass also delivers the day’s most quoted phrase — that the company traveled “the worst road (if road it can be called) that was ever travelled” — a line absent from every other narrator. His attention to timber species (“most beautiful tall straight pine trees of different kinds, except of white pine”) and to small game (“pheasants and ducks, and a small squirrel”) suggests a carpenter’s and woodsman’s eye that the others lack. He alone mentions that “a son of our guide joined us to-day,” a piece of human geography Clark also notes only obliquely.
Clark’s Captain’s-Eye View
William Clark’s entry is the shortest and the most administrative. He gives no mileage at all, instead orienting the day topographically: “over high ruged hills passing the heads of the Small runs which fall into the river on our left to a large Creek which falls into the river 6 miles to our left.” His prose is the register of a commander recording decisions: he “despatched 2 men to the mouth of the Creek” — Whitehouse and Ordway specify three — and notes the consequence of the weather in command terms: “Some rain to day at 12 and in the evening which obliges us to Continu all night.”
Clark also adds a strategic note absent from the enlisted men’s journals:
all the Indians leave us except our Guide
For the captain, the departure of the Shoshone party was a fact of consequence; for Whitehouse and Ordway, focused on choke cherries and salmon trades, it apparently was not worth recording. Where the sergeants and private tally fish gigged (“Several”) and bear wounded, Clark precisely counts: “we giged 4 Sammon & killed one Deer to Day… one man Shot two bear this evining unfortunately we Could git neither of them.”
Read together, the four entries demonstrate how a single day in the expedition’s hardest country generated four overlapping but distinct documents — Whitehouse and Ordway in close textual partnership, Gass independent in both mileage and emphasis, and Clark recording the day in the clipped, decision-oriented register of command.
