The expedition was physically divided on August 23, 1805. Clark, with a guide and three men, was pressing down the Salmon River to test whether canoes could descend it. Lewis remained at Camp Fortunate with the main party, the sunken canoes, and a growing camp of Shoshone visitors. Gass moved with Clark’s advance party; Ordway and Whitehouse stayed with Lewis. The result is an unusually clean split in the record — half the journals describe a reconnaissance, half describe a layover — and the contrast is what makes the day legible.
Clark’s Verdict on the River
Clark’s entry is the day’s most consequential document. He set out early over terrain where “the rocks were So Sharp large and unsettled and the hill sides Steep that the horses could with the greatest risque and dificulty get on,” halted the main party at a bad riffle, and went forward twelve miles on foot with his guide. His conclusion is unambiguous: the river is “almost one continued rapid, five verry Considerable rapids the passage of either with Canoes is entirely impossable.” He catalogues the engineering problem precisely — one rapid where the mountains “Close So Clost as to prevent a possibility of a portage,” others passable only by lowering empty canoes on cords — and weighs it against the food situation:
we have but little and nothing to be precured in this quarter except Choke Cheres & red haws not an animal of any kind to be seen and only the track of a Bear
This is the reconnaissance that killed the Salmon River route.
Gass, traveling with Clark as far as the halt, preserves the texture Clark omits: “dreadful narrows, where the rocks were in some places breast high, and no path or trail of any kind.” He also notes that a sergeant was “very unwell,” a detail absent from every other journal, and that hunters failed to recover a wounded buck. Where Clark writes as a decision-maker compiling evidence, Gass writes as a man who walked the ground.
Lewis at Camp Fortunate: Logistics and Ethnography
Lewis’s entry is the day’s longest and most layered. He records the practical work — sinking the canoes in a pond, weighting them with stone, pulling the gage-hole plugs to defeat both flood and prairie fire — and adds the diplomatic calculation: “the Indians have promised to do them no intentional injury and beleive they are too lazy at any rate to give themselves the trouble to raise them.” He wanted to march; Cameahwait asked him to wait for an incoming party of about fifty, and Lewis “consented from necessity.”
The day’s ethnographic set-piece is the mule-deer chase. Lewis watched roughly twelve mounted Shoshone run a buck down for four miles: “it was really entertaining… this mule buck was the largest deer of any kind I had ever seen. it was nearly as large as a doe Elk.” What follows is sharper than the spectacle. Lewis observed that the meat was not shared out, asked Cameahwait why, and recorded the answer: “meat was so scarce with them that the men who killed it reserved it for themselves and their own families.” He flags this as a departure from “the nations of Indians with whom I have hitherto been acquainted.” The detail is a quiet measure of how thin Shoshone subsistence had become — and it explains why Lewis then distributed three of his hunters’ deer to families with nothing.
Ordway, Whitehouse, and the Documented Copy
Ordway and Whitehouse describe the same day at Camp Fortunate, and the parallel is close enough to confirm the well-known pattern of Whitehouse drawing on Ordway. Compare Ordway’s “about 3 oClock P. M. another party of the Snake nation arived here about 40 of them on horse back” with Whitehouse’s “about 4 oClock P. M. their came another party of the Snake Indians on horseback, about 40 in nomber.” The hunter’s tally — “2 large deer and three Small ones” — is identical in both, down to phrasing. Whitehouse adjusts the hour and adds “they appear the Same as the others did,” but the spine is Ordway’s.
Both enlisted journals also fix the arriving party at forty; Lewis puts it at “about 50 men women and Children” and notes the unsettling subtext — that many of the new arrivals were heading down-valley toward buffalo country, and that some Shoshone who had promised to guide the expedition over the mountains were tempted to go with them. Neither Ordway nor Whitehouse registers that anxiety. It is the kind of strategic worry that surfaces only in the captains’ journals, and on August 23 it sits beneath Lewis’s prose like a second floor under the first.
Gass on Shoshone Material Culture
Gass closes his entry with an inventory the others skip entirely: the Shoshone have “but four guns in the nation,” spear fish with bone-tipped poles, run goats down on horseback, and dress in goat- and mountain-sheep-skin shifts “which come down to the middle of the leg.” He notes one robe “made of ground hog skins.” Lewis’s hunting scene and Gass’s costume catalogue belong to the same ethnographic project, but Gass — writing from the trail, not the council — preserves the cheaper, harder-edged details: how few firearms, how the fish are taken, what the poorest robes are made of.
