Voice
Joseph Whitehouse wrote the expedition the way a private soldier keeps a fatigue book — terse, dutiful, and pegged to the day’s mileage. His sentences open with weather and close with a campsite: “a clear pleasant morning. we Set off eairly and proceeded on… Came 19 miles this day and Camped on the South Side” (1805-05-08). That formula, repeated hundreds of times, is the spine of his journal. He was an enlisted man with limited schooling — his orthography (“eairly,” “proc’d,” “verry,” “perogue,” “Lar’d,” “Star’d”) is consistent enough to feel like a personal dialect rather than carelessness — and the prose register stays low and operational throughout.
And yet Whitehouse is not without curiosity. When something genuinely strikes him, the ledger cracks open. Near the Gasconade on 1804-05-28 he wandered off and found a cavern, and he allowed himself a rare superlative:
“I went a 100 yards under ground. had no light in my hand if I had, I should have gone further their was a Small Spring in it. it is the most remarkable cave I ever Saw, in my travels.”
The phrase “in my travels” — from a man who had scarcely traveled — is one of the small, touching tells of his voice. Similarly, when the party killed a grizzly on 1805-05-05, Whitehouse switched suddenly into the precise idiom of a tradesman taking measurements: “round the head is three-feet 5 Inches, d° the neck 3 feet 11 Inches, d° the breast 5 feet 10½ Inches.” The ditto-marks (“d°”) are the giveaway: this is a man comfortable with inventories, bills of lading, and quartermaster’s lists, applying that same tabular eye to a bear.
Omissions
What Whitehouse does not write is as telling as what he does. He almost never describes his own feelings. Sergeant Floyd’s death is given in a single line on 1804-08-19 — “Serg! Floyd Taken verry ill this morning with a coUick” — with no follow-up grief. Reed’s desertion and punishment (1804-09-18) is reported without comment beyond the chiefs’ reaction. The near-firefight with the Tetons on 1804-09-28, one of the most dangerous moments of the expedition, gets a vivid blow-by-blow but no introspection: he writes that Lewis was “near cutting the cable with his Sword and giving orders for the party to fire on them,” and then simply moves on to the next day’s wind.
He rarely names his fellow privates as companions or friends — they appear chiefly as “the hunters,” “one of the party,” or by surname when they kill game. He almost never editorializes about the captains; Lewis and Clark are simply “our officers” or “the Commanding Officer,” rendered with neutral deference. He omits, too, the ethnographic ambition that animates Lewis’s prose: where Lewis would dilate on Indian custom or botany, Whitehouse gives the bare fact and stops. On 1805-01-22 he notes red cloth left at an Indian camp and offers one of his rare interpretations — “we expect they left last winter for a Sacrifice to their maker as that is their form of worship, as they have Some knowledge of the Supreme being, and anything above their comprihention they call big medicine” — but even this comparatively expansive remark is folded back into the day’s mileage.
Conspicuously absent, too, is any sense of literary ambition. There are no set-piece descriptions of the Great Falls, no rhapsodies on the Missouri Breaks, no echoes of the sublime. Where Lewis writes a paragraph on a sunset, Whitehouse writes “clouday.”
Patterns
Several recurring tics structure the journal. First, the daily inventory of game killed: Whitehouse is the expedition’s unofficial butcher’s-book. “the hunters killed 1 Buffalow one Elk 3 Deer one woolf 1 Deer & four Turkies” (1804-09-06). “34 deers, 10 Elks and 5 Buffelows… Upwards of 20 hundred Wt” (1804-11-01). The arithmetic of survival matters to him in a way that scenery does not.
Second, river measurement and latitude: he reports widths in yards (“the Grandosage River… 397 yards wide the Missourie is at this place 875 yards wide,” 1804-06-02) and copies down the captains’ latitude observations almost reverently. Third, weather and wind as the opening clause of nearly every entry. Fourth, a steady accounting of discipline and morale: the swivel fired on departure (1804-05-14), the gill of whiskey issued (1805-05-05), the New Year’s celebration with “a Glass of old ardent Spirits” and dancing (1805-01-01), the night of 1805-06-25 when “the party all of us amused ourselves with dancing untill 10 oC. all in cheerfulness and good humor.”
Fifth, an interest — perhaps the most personal in his journal — in encounters with Native women and dancing. The St. Charles entries are unusually warm: “passed the evening verry agreeable dancing with the french ladies, &c.” (1804-05-18). At the Mandan villages he repeatedly notes going “up to the village to dance” (1805-01-01, 1805-01-07).
Sixth, his journal is famously not entirely his own. The editorial note at 1804-06-08 records that two other hands wrote portions of the manuscript — handwriting “No. 2” carrying the entries from June 8 to July 20, 1804, and another hand for November 1 to December 2. This is itself characteristic of Whitehouse: the journal is a collective artifact of the enlisted mess, passed around when he was indisposed (he reports frozen feet on 1805-01-14, illness on 1805-06-13, a sore shoulder on 1805-08-02), rather than the jealously guarded literary project of an officer.
Comparisons and Change Across the Arc
Whitehouse’s prose evolves audibly. The earliest entries (May 1804) are crisp, short, and almost telegraphic: “Some rainy. we took on board Some more provision bread &c.” (1804-05-21). The middle Missouri entries written by his substitute hand are choppier still and full of mileage figures (“Roe’ 16 mile,” “Roe’ 12 Miles”). When Whitehouse resumes his own pen at Fort Mandan (the editor’s note at 1804-12-22 marks the handover), the entries lengthen and gain a slightly more confident syntax. By the spring of 1805, ascending the Missouri, he is capable of sustained narrative paragraphs — the grizzly measurements of 1805-05-05, the bear chase of 1805-05-14 in which the wounded animal “chased one man down a Steep bank in to the River and was near gitting hold of him,” and the buffalo herd that swam through camp on 1805-05-29 and “broke a blunderbuss, & bent a rifle & came up the bank through the Camp & like to have tramped on Several of the men as they were a Sleep.”
The Great Falls portage entries (mid-June 1805) show him at his most engaged: he tracks the truck-wagons, the prickly pear, Sergeant Pryor’s illness, the mending of moccasins, and the men dancing in the evening despite exhaustion. By the time the party reaches the Three Forks on 1805-07-27, Whitehouse has begun to incorporate small narrative details he would have skipped a year earlier — Sacagawea’s capture site, for instance, mentioned twice (1805-07-27 and 1805-07-30) with a quiet specificity: “they took hir as She was attempting to make hir ascape by crossing a Shole place on the River, but was taken in the middle of it.”
Compared with the other journalists, Whitehouse sits between Ordway’s clerkly steadiness and Gass’s blunter soldier-prose, but lacks the literary reach of either captain. He is closest in spirit to Ordway, but where Ordway’s daily entries are a clean roll-call, Whitehouse’s are more uneven — sometimes terse to the point of opacity (“a fair morning”; 1804-05-18 is barely a paragraph), sometimes unexpectedly detailed when game is large or the danger acute. His grizzly is bigger than Ordway’s grizzly because he weighed it.
Above all, Whitehouse offers historians the expedition seen from the rope and the towline. When he writes on 1804-06-30 that “the day mighty hot when we went to toe the Sand [s]calded Our [feet] Some fled from the rope had to put on Our Mockisons,” or on 1805-07-14 that “all hands had to Get in the Watter to keep up the boat,” we are reading the labor of the expedition rather than its philosophy. He is the soldier in the river, counting miles, naming the deer, and writing it down at night by firelight in spelling all his own.
