The confluence the expedition reached on June 3, 1805 presented Lewis and Clark with what would prove the most consequential navigational decision of the westward journey. Two rivers of nearly equal magnitude joined here, and the captains, unwilling to commit the party to either without firmer evidence, dispatched two small reconnaissance parties—a sergeant and two men up each fork. Both Patrick Gass and Joseph Whitehouse were among those sent, and each left a record of the day. Read side by side, their entries reveal as much about the social structure of the Corps as they do about the geography of the forks.
Identical Measurements, Different Vantage Points
The two journals agree with striking precision on the empirical facts gathered at the point. Both record the captains’ meridian altitude yielding a latitude of 47° 24′ 12″ North. Both give the width of the north fork as 186 yards and the south fork as 372 yards. Both note that the parties ascended roughly fifteen miles up each branch before turning back. This convergence is not accidental: such figures were almost certainly shared at camp that evening, with the enlisted men copying or memorizing the captains’ measurements rather than taking them independently.
Where the entries diverge is in framing. Gass, writing in the compressed, semi-official register that characterizes his published journal, presents the day as an orderly problem in command:
The commanding officers could not determine which of these rivers or branches, it was proper to take; and therefore concluded to send a small party up each of them. Myself and two men went up the south branch, and a serjeant and two more up the north.
Gass identifies himself as leading the south-branch party—a detail worth noting, since he had been elected sergeant the previous autumn after the death of Sergeant Floyd. His prose is impersonal and procedural. He names the tributary entering the north fork “Rose river” (the stream Lewis would more famously christen the Marias), describes its muddy water and rapid current, and notes plainly that the captains “were not yet satisfied with respect to the proper river to ascend.”
Whitehouse and the Texture of the Ranks
Whitehouse, by contrast, writes from inside the column. His entry is longer, more digressive, and far more revealing of the mood among the men. He records that he himself was sent up the left-hand (south) fork “as a Spye,” and that he killed two elk during the reconnaissance—a detail Gass omits entirely. He also reports the hunters’ tally for the day (“4 buffaloe 3 Elk 3 beaver & Deer”) and the captains’ issue of “a dram of ardent Spirits” to each man, the kind of small comfort that loomed large in the enlisted memory.
Most valuably, Whitehouse preserves the discontent that Gass’s tidier account suppresses:
Several of the party complain of their feet being Sore by their walking in the Sand & cut by the Stones. we to be Sure have a hard time of it oblidged to walk on Shore & haul the towing line and ⅔ of the time barefooted.
And on the central question of the day, Whitehouse is candid in a way Gass is not: “our officers & all the men differ in their opinions which river to take.” He even ventures the men’s geographic reasoning—the right-hand fork seemed to bend too far north, while the left-hand fork was thought to head in the mountains. As historians have long observed, the rank and file overwhelmingly favored the muddy north branch as the true Missouri; Lewis and Clark, reasoning from Mandan testimony and the clarity of the south fork’s water, would ultimately overrule them.
Two Registers of the Same Day
The pairing is instructive. Gass writes as a sergeant whose journal would later be edited for publication: clipped, factual, deferential to command. Whitehouse writes as a private whose manuscript was not shaped for a reading public, and who therefore records sore feet, divided opinions, individual hunting feats, and the small ration of spirits that closed the day. Where Gass tells the reader what the captains decided to do, Whitehouse tells the reader what the party thought about it. Both entries are essential; neither alone captures the confluence as the Corps experienced it on June 3, 1805.
