The entries of May 25, 1804 capture a moment of symbolic weight: the Corps of Discovery’s passage beyond the last Euro-American settlement on the Missouri River. Four enlisted journalists — Sergeant Patrick Gass, Sergeant John Ordway, Private Joseph Whitehouse, and Sergeant Charles Floyd — each record the day’s progress to the French village they call St. Johns (elsewhere identified as La Charette). Read together, their entries offer a striking case study in how shared experience produced shared language, and where individual voices broke through.
A Refrain Across Four Journals
The most arresting feature of the May 25 entries is the near-verbatim closing line shared by all four narrators. Gass writes that the village is
the last settlement of white people on the river.
Ordway echoes him almost exactly:
this is the last Settlement of whites on this River.
Whitehouse closes with
this is the last Settlement of white people on this River.
And Floyd:
this is the Last Setelment of whites on this River
This convergence is not coincidence. Scholars of the expedition journals have long recognized that the enlisted men consulted one another’s notes, or shared a common oral formulation circulated in camp. The phrase appears as well in Clark’s curated entry concerning La Charette — “This is the last Settlement of Whites on this river” — suggesting the formulation may have originated with the captains and filtered down, or alternatively that it reflects a sentiment voiced collectively as the boats pulled in. Either way, the four enlisted journalists clearly were not composing in isolation.
The same pattern holds for their description of the landscape just before the village. Compare the language used for the terrain near Wood River:
- Gass: “the banks of the river are here high and the land rich”
- Ordway: “land handsome the Soil Rich &C. high Banks”
- Floyd: “the Land is Good & handsom the Soil Rich & high Banks”
The triangulation of “handsome,” “rich,” and “high banks” across three of the four journals indicates a stock vocabulary the men deployed for favorable bottomland — likely a vocabulary established in earlier entries and reapplied here without much variation.
Whitehouse Departs from the Script
Against this chorus of similarity, Joseph Whitehouse’s entry stands apart for what it adds. Where Gass, Ordway, and Floyd note only the village and the encampment, Whitehouse alone records a passing encounter:
a boat came here loaded with fur & Skins —had been a long destance up the River tradeing with the Savages &c.
This is a detail of considerable interest. The descending trader’s boat was, in a real sense, a vessel of intelligence — coming downriver from precisely the country the expedition was about to enter. That Gass, Ordway, and Floyd omit the encounter while Whitehouse preserves it reminds the reader that even when journalists shared formulas, individual attention varied. Whitehouse, often dismissed in early scholarship as the least polished of the journal-keepers, here captures a piece of the day’s texture the sergeants miss.
Whitehouse also notes that the party “Set out eairly,” a temporal marker absent from the others, and frames the arrival “towards evening,” giving his entry a narrative arc the more telegraphic accounts lack.
Register and Orthography
The four entries also illustrate the range of literacy among the enlisted journalists. Gass — whose journal would later be edited by David McKeehan and published in 1807 — writes in the most polished prose, with conventional spelling and full syntactic sentences. Ordway’s hand is competent but compressed, leaning on abbreviations (“S Side,” “N. S,” “&C.”). Floyd’s spelling is phonetic and idiosyncratic (“Setelment,” “handsom”), as is Whitehouse’s (“eairly,” “destance,” “tradeing”). These differences are valuable to historians: the rougher orthography of Floyd and Whitehouse better preserves the spoken cadences of the camp, while Gass’s smoother prose reflects either his own greater schooling or — more likely in the published version — the editorial polish applied later.
Taken together, the May 25 entries demonstrate that the expedition’s documentary record is neither four independent witnesses nor a single voice in four hands, but something in between: a community of observers who shared phrases, compared notes, and yet, in small but consequential ways, each saw something the others did not.
