On August 28, 1805, the Corps of Discovery was split between two camps in the Lemhi Valley, negotiating the horses that would carry them over the Bitterroots. Captain Lewis bargained at the upper Shoshone village while Captain Clark waited some twelve to fifteen miles downriver. Four journals survive from the day — Lewis’s is absent here — and together they offer a rare opportunity to watch a single piece of news (the running horse count) move between camps and through registers.
The Horse Tally as Shared Fact
All four narrators converge on the same number: twenty-five horses. John Ordway records that Lewis “bought 5 or 6 more horses to day. we have now in all 25, but the most of them have Sore backs.” Joseph Whitehouse echoes him almost verbatim: “Cap! Lewis has bought 5 or 6 more to day we have now 25 in all.” Patrick Gass, who physically traveled between the camps, supplies the arithmetic that explains the figure:
went on to the upper village, where I found Captain Lewis and his party buying horses. They had got 23, which with 2 we had, made in the whole 25.
Clark, writing from the lower camp, knew only what the messenger told him: Lewis “had precured 22 horses for our rout through by land.” The discrepancy between Clark’s 22 and Gass’s 23 is the signature of news in transit — Clark recorded the count as it stood when the messenger left, while Gass and the upper-camp diarists tallied a later purchase. The near-identical phrasing of Ordway and Whitehouse — both noting the sore backs implicitly through the same sentence structure, both flagging the doubled price, both timing Gass’s arrival “about 2 oClock” — suggests the customary close coordination between these two enlisted journalists, with Whitehouse appearing to follow Ordway’s framing while adding his own observations (the snow patches to the south, the iron gigs).
Details One Narrator Catches
Each writer preserves something the others omit. Whitehouse alone notes the lingering snow: “Some Spots of Snow continues to lay on the mountain a fiew miles to the South of us” — a detail with obvious bearing on the coming crossing. Ordway alone supplies the ethnographic note that the Shoshone fishing gigs use “a bone Sharpened and fixed on poles,” where Whitehouse generalizes to “Iron gigs.” Both men remark on the Shoshone appetite for salt, with Ordway offering the more pointed observation: “these Savages are fond of Salt, the first we have seen that would taste it.” Gass, writing his published-style condensation, strips away the ethnography entirely and ends instead on weather: “I found the weather very cold for the season.”
Clark’s entry stands apart in register and content. While the upper-camp journalists count horses and observe a council, Clark documents subsistence at the margin. He records small, specific transactions:
I purchased Some fish roe of those pore but kind people with whome I am Encamped for which I gave three Small fish hooks, the use of which they readily proseved
Where Ordway and Whitehouse use the period’s standard “Savages,” Clark writes “those pore but kind people” — a striking register difference between the captain dependent on Shoshone generosity and the enlisted men observing a council from the outside. The arrival of two riders from a southern band “near the Spanish country,” reported by both Ordway and Whitehouse, goes unmentioned by Clark, who had no way of knowing about it.
Hunger in the First Person
The day’s most personal sentence comes from Clark, and it has no parallel in any other journal:
Those Sammon which I live on at present are pleasent eateing, not with standing they weaken me verry fast and my flesh I find is declineing
Ordway and Whitehouse note flatly that “our hunters killed nothing this day.” Gass mentions cold. Only Clark turns the failed hunt inward, registering a body in measurable decline. The sentence also clarifies the urgency behind the horse trade the upper camp was conducting: every additional pack animal Lewis purchased was an answer to the salmon diet that was wasting his co-captain. Read together, the four entries form a single document of an expedition stretched thin across fifteen river-miles — Lewis’s party doing the buying, Clark’s party doing the waiting and the going hungry, and Gass riding back and forth between them carrying the count.
