August 29, 1805 marks a pivotal logistical convergence for the Corps of Discovery. After Clark’s downstream reconnaissance of the Salmon River canyon, his party rejoined Lewis at the upper Shoshone village in the Lemhi Valley. The day’s four surviving accounts — by Clark, Ordway, Whitehouse, and Gass — converge on a single decision: the river route is impassable, and the expedition will instead attempt to go around or between the mountains. Yet the narrators differ sharply in what they consider worth recording.
Ordway and Whitehouse: A Shared Source
The entries by Ordway and Whitehouse are so closely parallel that textual dependence is unmistakable. Both open with the arrival of returning Shoshone kinsmen at roughly 8 A.M., both note that one warrior had been scalped, and both describe the wailing reception in the village. Ordway writes that
one of them got Sculped by some Indians in the prarie or plain he did not know what nation they belonged to. Some of their relations cryed when they came in the village.
Whitehouse renders the same scene with only minor variation: “one of the warrie[r]s had been Sculped by Some war party in the plain. a nomber of their relation cryed aloud when they arived in the village.” The two sergeants then proceed in near-lockstep through Clark’s 11 A.M. arrival, the report of the canyon’s impassability, the lodge of berry-gatherers calmed by the Shoshone guide, the Indians’ warning that older men had searched westward “a Season or more” without reaching the ocean, and the Shoshones’ refusal to sell more horses without guns. The shared phrasing — “amazeing high and rough,” the count of “6” salmon and “one Deer,” the formula “round the or between the mountains and Strike Columbian River below if possable” — suggests one narrator was copying or both were drawing from a common field source, very likely Ordway’s notebook, which is known to have circulated among the enlisted journalists.
Clark’s Diplomatic Register
Clark, by contrast, writes from the perspective of the negotiator. He records nothing of the scalped warrior or the wailing relatives — events that must have unfolded before his arrival but that he evidently did not consider expedition business. Instead his entry reconstructs the council itself:
I Spoke to the Indians on various Subjects endeavoring to impress on theire minds the advantaje it would be to them for to Sell us horses and expedite the our journey the nearest and best way possibly that we might return as Soon as possible and winter with them at Some place where there was plenty of buffalow
This is the only account that articulates the captains’ bargaining strategy — appealing to a future buffalo-hunting alliance. Clark also alone records the personal transaction by which he obtained a mount: “I purchased a horse for which I gave my Pistol 100 Balls Powder & a Knife.” The price is striking — a sidearm and ammunition — and confirms in concrete detail what Ordway and Whitehouse describe only abstractly when they report that the Shoshones “must keep Some horses unless they could git arms and ammunition in return.” Clark’s willingness to part with his pistol shows the captains breaking, at least individually, the policy line they presented in council. He closes with a flash of personal feeling rare in his entries: the venison from the hunters “was a great treat to me as I had eate none for 8 days past.”
Gass: The Ethnographer in Camp
Gass produces an entirely different document. Left behind with another man to “keep camp and prepare packsaddles,” he was absent from both the council and the reunion. His entry therefore ignores the day’s strategic crisis altogether and instead offers a small ethnographic essay on Shoshone material culture. He describes the fire-drill technique with measured precision —
They have two sticks ready for the operation, one about 9 and the other 18 inches long: the short stick they lay down flat and rub the end of the other upon it in a perpendicular direction for a few minutes; and the friction raises a kind of dust, which in a short time takes fire.
He then notes the watertight willow basketry, the sunflower and lambs-quarter seed cakes, and the practice of pounding salmon roe into soup. None of the other three narrators mentions any of these details. Gass’s editor-polished prose — likely worked over by David McKeehan after the expedition — gives this entry its characteristic textbook tone, but the underlying observations clearly originate in a day spent in close quarters with Shoshone women and elders while the captains were in council.
Patterns in the Day’s Record
Taken together, the four entries illustrate the stratified nature of the expedition’s documentary record. Clark writes the diplomatic and command layer; Ordway and Whitehouse share the enlisted men’s logistical narrative, with one demonstrably copying the other; and Gass, isolated in camp, supplies the ethnographic observations the others miss entirely. The decision to abandon the Salmon River corridor — among the most consequential of the expedition — is recorded in three of the four entries, but only Clark explains the reasoning in the captains’ own voice, and only Gass preserves the texture of Shoshone domestic life on the day that decision was made.
