September 9, 1805 finds the Corps moving down the Bitterroot Valley to the mouth of a creek Lewis names Travelers’ Rest, where he resolves to halt the following day for celestial observations and rest the horses. The day’s record is unusually rich because all five regular journalists — Lewis, Clark, Ordway, Gass, and Whitehouse — are writing, and because the captains had not yet entered the ordeal of the Lolo Trail. The contrast between Lewis’s expansive geographical reasoning and Gass’s terse soldierly summary is sharper here than on most days of the journey.
Five accounts of one valley
Lewis’s entry dominates in length and ambition. He measures the valley (“five to 6 miles wide”), inventories its timber (“almost altogether pine principally of the longleafed kind, with some spruce and a kind of furr resembleing the scotch furr”), gauges the river’s navigability, and — most consequentially — extracts intelligence from the Shoshone guide about an Indian pass eastward to the Missouri:
the guide informed us that a man might pass to the missouri from hence by that rout in four days.
This is the seed of the route Lewis himself will use on the return in 1806. None of the other narrators preserves this geographical disclosure. Clark’s entry, by contrast, is a surveyor’s ledger: distances to creek crossings (“at 11/2 miles … at 10 miles … at 15 miles”) and a hunters’ tally, ending with the laconic “See Suplement” — a referral to Lewis’s fuller account that itself documents the captains’ division of labor.
The enlisted men and the Ordway–Whitehouse pattern
Ordway and Whitehouse describe the same march in nearly identical sequence and vocabulary, confirming the well-documented pattern of Whitehouse drawing on Ordway. Both note the cottonwood and pine along the banks, both record “the Snow continues on the Mo[untain]s each Side of this valley,” both register the wild or choke cherries, and both report the same hunting results — though with a telling discrepancy. Ordway writes that “one of the hunters killed a goose and a wood pecker,” while Whitehouse expands this to “three geese and a wood pecker.” Lewis’s own entry confirms three geese, suggesting Whitehouse either corrected Ordway against another source or that Ordway’s singular was a slip of the pen.
The woodpecker, dismissed by the enlisted men in a single phrase, becomes a small natural-history event in Lewis’s hands:
one of them brought with him a redheaded woodpecker of the large kind common to the U States. this is the first of the kind I have seen since I left the Illinois.
The same bird, four pens, four scales of meaning.
Game, hunger, and a coming hardship
Gass’s entry is the outlier in tone. Where Lewis sees a navigable stream and a strategic pass, and where Ordway and Whitehouse catalogue handsome pitch pine and pleasant plains, Gass records scarcity:
found the country mountainous and poor; and the game scarce. … Four hunters had been out to-day, but killed nothing; we therefore supped upon a small quantity of corn we had yet left.
Gass’s account cannot be reconciled with the others on the day’s hunting — Clark logs four deer, four ducks, and three prairie fowl; Ordway and Whitehouse confirm three deer and several ducks; Lewis notes Drewyer arriving with two deer. The likeliest explanation is that Gass is conflating the day’s record or writing after the fact with the Lolo crossing’s privation already coloring his memory. His entry reads as foreshadowing rather than reportage.
Read together, the five entries capture a hinge moment. The valley march is easy; the hunters return; the captains name the creek for the rest it will provide. Yet Lewis’s careful interrogation of the guide about an alternate eastern route, and Gass’s premonitory note of scarcity, both point toward what lies west across the Bitterroots. The cross-narrator record on this day is less about disagreement than about how differently five men can preserve the same quiet day before a hard one.
