August 15, 1805 finds the Corps physically divided, and the journal record divides with it. Lewis is camped with Cameahwait’s Shoshone band on the west side of the Continental Divide, attempting to coax a reluctant village across to meet the canoes. Clark, Ordway, Gass, and Whitehouse are pushing the heavy canoes up the increasingly shallow Beaverhead River through what Clark christens “rattle Snake mountain.” The result is a day where Lewis’s entry and the four canoe-party entries scarcely intersect—two parallel narratives of a single date.
Lewis Alone: Diplomacy on an Empty Stomach
Lewis’s entry is by far the longest and the only one with diplomatic content. It opens on a striking domestic image:
This morning I arrose very early and as hungary as a wolf. I had eat nothing yesterday except one scant meal of the flour and berries except the dryed cakes of berries which did not appear to satisfy my appetite as they appeared to do those of my Indian friends.
The remaining two pounds of flour become both breakfast and instrument of statecraft. Lewis has McNeal cook half into “a kind of pudding with the burries,” feeding four men plus Cameahwait, who pronounces it “the best thing he had taisted for a long time” and inspects the flour curiously, asking if it is made of roots.
The diplomatic crisis that follows is recorded by no other narrator and would be invisible without Lewis’s pen. The Shoshone are reluctant to follow him east; some have whispered that the white men are decoying them into a Pahkee (Hidatsa/Atsina) ambush. Lewis’s response is a calculated appeal to honor:
I soon found that I had touched him on the right string; to doubt the bravery of a savage is at once to put him on his metal.
Cameahwait harangues the village a third time and commits to crossing the divide. Nothing in Ordway, Gass, Whitehouse, or Clark hints that the entire eastward leg of the expedition hung on this single conversation over berry pudding.
The Canoe Party: Four Witnesses to One Gorge
The four eastern-party narrators describe the same stretch of river, and the textual relationships are revealing. Ordway and Whitehouse track each other closely—both note the four deer skins Lewis cached on the 10th, both record the bad rapids and trout-filled eddies, both report knobs “covred with grass” with “Scattering” pines, and both close with the camp at a narrow plain near old Indian camps. Whitehouse’s wording (“Cap! Clark was near being bit by a rattle snake which was between his legs as he was Standing on Shore a fishing”) is nearly verbatim Ordway (“between his legs as he was fishing, on the shore”), consistent with the documented pattern of Whitehouse drafting from Ordway.
Gass, characteristically, compresses. He gives the day in a single paragraph, fixes the river at “not more than 20 yards wide, and about a foot and a half deep,” and notes what the enlisted men felt in their bodies:
The water is very cold, and severe and disagreeable to the men, who are frequently obliged to wade and drag the canoes.
Clark’s entry adds what only the captain would record: a meridian altitude (“Latd. 44° 0′ 48 1/10″”), the identification of “Willards Creek,” the geological note of “Dark brown Stone Some limestone intermixed,” and the observation that “an Indian road passes on the Lard Side latterly used”—a detail none of the enlisted men mention but which mattered as evidence the country was traveled.
The Rattlesnake Cluster
One incident penetrates three of the four canoe-party journals: Clark’s narrow escape from rattlesnakes while fishing. Clark himself reports it twice over—once for himself, once for Sacagawea: “I Saw Several rattle Snakes and narrowly escaped at two different times, as also the Squar when walking with her husband on Shore.” Ordway and Whitehouse both relay the same scene, with Ordway adding that Clark “Shot and killed 2 or 3 others this day.” Gass omits it entirely. The convergence is strong enough that Clark names the feature: “This mountn. I call rattle Snake mountain. not one tree on either Side to day”—a toponym Gass, Ordway, and Whitehouse do not yet use.
Sacagawea appears only obliquely and only in two journals: Ordway notes that “our Intrepters wife found and gethered a fine persel of servis berrys,” and Clark places her on shore with Charbonneau during the snake encounter. Lewis, far to the west negotiating her people’s cooperation, does not know she has had a near miss.
