September 3, 1805 found the Corps of Discovery struggling up the North Fork of the Salmon drainage in country their Shoshone guide had not intended them to enter. Four narrators — Whitehouse, Gass, Ordway, and Clark — left accounts of the day, and read together they reveal both the shared misery of the march and the distinct preoccupations each writer brought to his journal.
Parallel Phrasing Between Whitehouse and Ordway
The closest textual relationship of the day is between Joseph Whitehouse and John Ordway, whose entries share phrasing so specific it suggests one consulted the other or both drew from a common conversation in camp. Whitehouse writes that the party “took the mountains and w[ent] up and down the mountains all day,” while Ordway records they “took the mountain and went up and down rough rockey mountains all day.” Both men describe the balsam firs in nearly identical terms:
Some of the bolsom fer Some of that kind of timber in the vallies of these mountains is verry high about 100 & 60 feet, and verry Strait and handsom. the most of them are covred with warts full of the bolsom (Whitehouse)
Some of the balsom fer trees on the branches are about 100 and fifty feet high, and strait, the most of them are covred with warts filled with the balsom (Ordway)
The botanical detail — sap-filled blisters on the bark of subalpine fir — is recorded by neither Gass nor Clark. Both enlisted journalists also close with the formulaic phrase “wet hungry and cold,” and both report the day’s distance as eleven miles. The shared register is plain and physical: rocks, horses falling, springs crossed, fatigue endured.
Gass’s Narrative Order, Clark’s Catalog of Loss
Patrick Gass organizes the day differently. Where Whitehouse and Ordway compress events, Gass narrates a clear sequence: breakfast on the last salmon, two hunters dispatched ahead, nine miles to a dinner halt, a two-hour rest, then three more miles over a large mountain. Gass alone names the food explicitly — “the last of our pork” eaten at midday — and explains the strategic frustration that the others omit: “This was not the creek our guide wished to have come upon.” His prose is the most legible to a reader unfamiliar with the terrain, a quality consistent with the fact that his journal would be the first published.
William Clark’s entry stands apart in both content and tone. As a captain, Clark records details of command and accounting that the enlisted men do not: the 8 o’clock departure, the dispatching of two men back for the load left from Lewis’s horse, the precise tally of game (“I killed 5 Pheasents & The huntes 4”), and a piece of instrumental news that no other narrator mentions:
we met with a great misfortune, in haveing our last Thmometer broken by accident
The loss of the expedition’s last thermometer was a scientific catastrophe that mattered to Clark in a way it apparently did not register with the sergeants and privates. Clark also notes a detail the others miss or compress: the precipitation began as snow at 3 o’clock, then turned to rain and finally sleet, with two inches of snow on the ground. Whitehouse mentions only that it “Set in to raining hard at dark,” and Ordway reports “several small showers.” Gass splits the difference with “a cold evening rain.”
What Each Narrator Notices
The convergences and divergences across the four entries map onto rank and role. Ordway, the senior sergeant, alone records the men’s hunger spilling into near-mutiny over food: “some of the men threaten to kill a colt to eat they being hungry, but puts it off untill tomorrow noon.” Neither Gass nor Whitehouse mentions the colt; Clark, perhaps tactfully, does not either, though he acknowledges “but little to eate.” Whitehouse offers the day’s only mention of distant snow on peak summits — “Saw Snow on the tops of Some of these mountains this day” — a vista Clark independently confirms with “The mountains to the East Covered with Snow.”
The four entries together do what no single account could: Gass supplies narrative scaffolding, Whitehouse and Ordway preserve the texture of physical labor and shared phrasing that hints at how journals were composed in camp, and Clark records the institutional losses — broken instruments, injured horses, failing provisions — that defined a commander’s view of one of the expedition’s worst days in the Bitterroots.
