The entries of May 17, 1805, offer an unusually clear example of how the Lewis and Clark journals stratify into distinct registers. Four narrators — Patrick Gass, John Ordway, Joseph Whitehouse, and William Clark — describe the same stretch of the Missouri Breaks, but the texture of their accounts diverges sharply. The enlisted-men’s journals cluster around a shared template; Clark’s entry stands apart in detail, hazard, and consequence.
The Ordway–Whitehouse Template
The most striking textual relationship of the day lies between Ordway and Whitehouse. Both men describe the eroded hills, the scattered pitch pine, the geese and goslings, the 2 o’clock dinner halt at a small bottom with old Indian camps, the 3 o’clock departure, and the killing of the first female bear of the voyage. The phrasing tracks closely. Ordway writes that the party
saw large gangs of Elk which are gitting more pleanty than the buffaloe
while Whitehouse, in nearly the same sequence, records that they
Saw large gangs of Elk, but a fiew buffaloe.
This is a familiar pattern in the journals: Whitehouse appears to have leaned on Ordway’s account (or a shared source) when composing his own. Whitehouse simplifies, smooths spelling slightly, and trims Ordway’s first-person involvement — Ordway notes that he himself was among those who killed the bear (“I and Several more of the party”), a personal claim Whitehouse omits in favor of the collective “we killed.”
Gass, by contrast, writes in a tighter, more literary register, the product of his journal’s later editorial polishing. Where Ordway and Whitehouse note pitch pine and washed knobs, Gass reaches for a simile:
There are some of them which at a distance resemble ancient steeples.
None of the other three narrators offers any such image. Gass also gives the cleanest navigational summary — 20¼ miles, encamped on the south side, river about 300 yards wide — but says nothing of the bear, the dinner halt, or the Indian camps that anchor the Ordway–Whitehouse pair.
What Only Clark Records
Clark’s entry is in a different category altogether. He alone gives the morning’s mercury reading (60°), the wind direction, the falling river, and the use of the tow rope. He alone notices the geology with a naturalist’s attention, twice remarking the “Salt Substance” and “white appearance of Salts or tarter” on the hills, and noting coal thrown out by floods in one of the creeks. He alone reports the brackish taste of the creek water near its mouth.
Two episodes appear in no other journal. The first is a near-miss with a rattlesnake:
I was nearly treading on a Small fierce rattle Snake different from any I had ever Seen &c. one man the party killed another of the Same kind.
The second is Clark’s identification of the night’s campsite as the remains of a fortified Indian camp, which he attributes specifically to
a Mi ne tar re war party of about 15 men, that Set out from their village in March last to war against the Blackfoot Indians.
This is intelligence Clark could only have carried from the winter at Fort Mandan, and it shows how the captains read the landscape as a record of regional warfare invisible to the enlisted men, who saw only “Some old Indians camps” (Ordway) or “Some old Indian Camps” (Whitehouse).
The Fire the Others Slept Through
The most consequential omission in the enlisted journals is the night’s emergency. Clark describes being roused late at night when a burning tree leaned over the captains’ lodge:
we had the lodge moved Soon after the Dry limbs & top of the tree fell in the place the Lodge Stood, the wind blew hard and the dry wood Cought & fire flew in every direction, burnt our Lodge verry much from the Coals which fell on it altho at Some distance in the plain, the whole party was much disturbed by this fire which could not be extinguished
Clark insists “the whole party was much disturbed,” yet Gass, Ordway, and Whitehouse pass over the incident in silence. The likeliest explanation is timing of composition: the enlisted men appear to have written their entries earlier in the evening, before the fire began, and did not return to amend them. The result is a documentary asymmetry in which a near-disaster that threatened the captains’ shelter survives only in Clark’s hand — a useful reminder that the silences in any single journal are as significant as its contents, and that cross-narrator comparison is the only reliable way to reconstruct a given day on the river.
