The journal entries for September 7, 1804 present a striking case of narrative divergence among the expedition’s enlisted chroniclers. Patrick Gass and John Ordway both describe a day spent on the Missouri near a distinctive conical hill — likely the formation in present-day Boyd County, Nebraska, near where the captains observed their first black-tailed prairie dog town. Joseph Whitehouse, however, records something altogether different: a visit to an Indian encampment, a scalp dance, and a nighttime accident with the boat’s anchor. The contrast offers a useful caution about the dating and copying practices that shaped the enlisted men’s journals.
Gass and Ordway: The Prairie Dog Village
Gass and Ordway corroborate one another closely. Both note the round, prominent hill that drew the captains’ curiosity, and both describe the labor-intensive effort to extract a live prairie dog by pouring water into the burrows. Gass writes that the party
took with them all the kettles and other vessels for holding water; in order to drive the animals out of their holes by pouring in water; but though they worked at the business till night, they only caught one of them.
Ordway’s account aligns almost exactly, reporting that the men "attempted to drown Several of them out of their holes, but they caught but one which they brought in alive." Ordway adds the naturalist’s detail Gass omits — a description of the animal itself:
they are a curious annimal about the Size of a little dog, & of a grayish coulour resembles them nearly except the tail which is like a Ground Squirrel, they will Stand on their hind feet & look &. C.
Gass, by contrast, compares the prairie dog only in size, "about that of the smallest species of domestic dogs." The difference is characteristic: Ordway, a sergeant keeping a more systematic daily record, tends toward fuller descriptive passages, while Gass — whose journal was later edited for publication by David McKeehan — often compresses observation into summary. Ordway also preserves a small narrative grace note absent from Gass: the breakfast halt at "one of Colters Camps," a reference to John Colter’s wandering search for the expedition’s lost horses, which Gass instead folds into his note about the abandoned scaffold of dried meat.
The Knob "as if it had been made with hands of man"
Both Gass and Ordway register the captains’ interest in the conical hill, but Ordway captures the impression more vividly, reporting that Lewis and Clark "informed us that it was a curious place as if it had been made with hands of man." This phrasing anticipates the more famous description of the Spirit Mound a fortnight earlier and suggests the captains were actively cataloguing landform anomalies along this stretch of the Missouri. Gass mentions only that the officers "went to view a round knob of a hill in a prairie" — a flatter rendering that loses the suggestion of artificial construction.
Whitehouse’s Misalignment
Whitehouse’s entry under this date describes a wholly different scene: a Yankton or Sioux encampment of roughly eighty lodges, women dressing buffalo hides, a war dance held around a fire with scalps of Omaha ("Mahars") warriors displayed on poles, and a near-disastrous accident in which a pirogue ran across the bow of the keelboat and parted its cable. He writes:
an axedant happened by running the perogue across the bow of the boat and broke our cable and lost our anker all hands was raised and roed the barge to Shore, the Savages ran down to know what was the matter.
None of these events appear in Gass or Ordway for September 7. The scene Whitehouse describes corresponds far more closely to the council with the Yankton Sioux at Calumet Bluff in late August, or to events surrounding the loss of the anchor that the captains record on a different date. Whitehouse’s journal, which survives in two versions (an original field notebook and a later fair copy), is known to contain dating errors and back-filled passages assembled from memory or from other journals. The entry here appears to be one such displacement.
The cross-narrator pattern for September 7 is therefore a useful lesson: when Gass and Ordway agree closely on incident and sequence, they are likely describing the day as it actually unfolded — the prairie dog hunt that would eventually send a live specimen to Thomas Jefferson’s study. Whitehouse, writing or recopying at some remove, has slipped the calendar.
