Lewis at the White Bear Islands: A Catalogue of Losses

Lewis’s entry is dominated by the inventory of damage at the cache. The river had risen and saturated the deposit, and his losses were both practical and scientific:

had the cash opened found my bearskins entirly destroyed by the water, the river having risen so high that the water had penitrated. all my specimens of plants also lost. the Chart of the Missouri fortunately escaped.

The destruction of his botanical specimens—gathered across thousands of miles of ascent—is recorded with the same compressed factuality as the spoiled bearskins. Lewis adds a particularly vivid detail of the medicine chest:

the stoper had come out of a phial of laudinum and the contents had run into the drawer and distroyed a gret part of my medicine in such manner that it was past recovery.

Patrick Gass, sharing the camp, offers a far more compressed version of the same scene, noting only that the party

opened a deposit we had made here and found some things spoiled

before turning to the universal complaints of the day: tormenting mosquitoes and howling wolves. Gass’s brevity here is characteristic; where Lewis itemizes scientific loss, Gass registers atmosphere and discomfort. Both, however, agree on the mosquitoes—Lewis admits he could not have written at all without his

musquetoe bier

, while Gass simply notes the torment.

Clark and Ordway at the Three Forks: A Choreographed Separation

The southern half of the day belongs to Clark and Ordway, whose entries describe the same events from complementary vantage points. Both men note the rendezvous with Sergeant Pryor’s horse party at the mouth of the Madison, and both record that Pryor had arrived only an hour before. Clark, as commanding officer, frames the moment administratively:

previous to their departur I gave instructions how they were to proceed &c. I also wrote to Capt Lewis by Sergt. Ordway

Ordway, receiving those instructions, records the parting from below:

Cap’ Clark & party leaves us hear to cross over to the River Roshjone. So we parted I and 9 more proceeded on down the river with the canoes verry well

The two narrators thus bracket the split from opposite sides—Clark looking after the canoes as they depart, Ordway looking back at the horse party crossing eastward.

Hunting tallies in the two journals diverge in instructive ways. Clark credits Pryor’s party with

6 deer & a white bear

, while Ordway records only

a deer and one antelope

killed and a white bear merely wounded. Such discrepancies are common when reports pass through intermediaries, and they suggest that Clark may have logged the cumulative game brought in while Ordway noted only what he personally witnessed at the rendezvous.

Sacagawea’s Counsel and the Geographer’s Eye

Clark’s entry is the longest and most ethnographically significant of the four. Alone among the day’s narrators, he records the strategic intervention of Sacagawea regarding the route across the divide:

The indian woman who has been of great Service to me as a pilot through this Country recommends a gap in the mountain more South which I shall cross

The passage is one of Clark’s most direct acknowledgments of Sacagawea’s geographic knowledge—neither Lewis, Gass, nor Ordway notes her role on this date. Clark also offers a sustained landscape description of the country between the Gallatin and Madison rivers, cataloging soil quality, stratified white rock, and the wildlife of the bottoms: antelope, deer, wolves, beaver, otter, eagles, hawks, crows, and geese.

Lewis, by contrast, closes his entry with a single naturalist’s note that has no parallel in the others:

killed a buffaloe picker a beatifull bird

—almost certainly a reference to the cowbird or a similar species associated with bison herds. Where Clark inventories an entire valley, Lewis isolates a single specimen. The contrast captures, in miniature, the working temperaments the two captains exhibited throughout the return journey.

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A Captain’s Panorama and a Captain’s Sickbed

Lewis’s entry is the most expansive of the four, a topographical set piece written from the vantage of a limestone cliff he climbed above the southeast fork. He converts the confluence into a survey, recording bearings (“the extreme point to which I could see the S. E. fork boar S. 65° E. distant 7 ms.”), measuring rock (“about 25 ft high”), and even identifying “a handsom site for a fortification” — a striking note of imperial imagination embedded in geographical description. Lewis also pauses over the limestone itself, describing it as

of an excellent quality of deep blue colour when fractured and of a light led colour where exposed to the weather. it appears to be of a very fine grain the fracture like that of marble.

Clark, by contrast, writes from inside his own body. His entry opens not with terrain but with symptoms: “I was verry unwell all last night with a high fever & akeing in all my bones.” He nonetheless pushes across the prairie to examine the middle fork for Indian sign, and closes with a brief medical self-report — “take 5 of rushes pills & bathe my feet & legs in hot water.” Where Lewis records the country, Clark records the cost of reconnoitering it. The two captains’ entries function as complements: Lewis supplies the panorama Clark was too sick to compose, and Clark supplies the scouting intelligence Lewis was not present to gather.

Gass and Whitehouse: The Enlisted View

Gass and Whitehouse, both with the main party, narrate the day’s arrival in similar sequence — morning departure, breakfast at the first fork, advance to the point, encampment, rain, Clark’s late return — but they diverge in detail and emphasis. Gass, characteristically efficient, frames the day around the men’s condition: “as the men were much fatigued, encamped in order to rest a day or two.” He notes the note Clark left on the north branch, the afternoon rain, and Clark’s illness with the laconic observation that “Capt. Clarke was very unwell and had been so all last night” — confirming Clark’s own account from an outside perspective.

Whitehouse offers the longest enlisted entry and the only one to register the human history of the site. Where Gass calls the valley “beautiful” and moves on, Whitehouse writes:

a large Camp of Indians has been encamped here Sometime ago. our Intrepters wife was taken prisoner at this place 3 or 4 years ago by the Gross vauntous Indians.

This is a detail neither captain records on this date — Sacagawea’s identification of the Three Forks as the site of her capture by the Hidatsa. Whitehouse also catches ecological specifics the others miss, including “clifts of rocks where was villages of little birds under the Shelving rocks” (cliff swallows) and a speculation about the absent Shoshone: “we expect they are gone over the mountains to the River called the Columbian River, to fish.”

Patterns of Convergence and Independence

The four entries demonstrate that the enlisted journalists were not simply copying the captains. Gass and Whitehouse share the day’s skeleton, but their wording, emphasis, and selection of detail diverge sharply — Gass terse and labor-focused, Whitehouse discursive and ethnographically attentive. Both record Clark’s illness independently of Clark’s own entry, and both report the hunters’ kills with different counts (Gass: “several”; Whitehouse: “6 Deer 3 otter & a musk rat” plus Clark’s party’s “Several Deer goats or antelopes and a young bear”), suggesting they tallied separately rather than from a shared source.

Lewis’s entry, meanwhile, stands apart in register and ambition. His prose is the only one to perform the work of formal geography, and it is also the only one to omit Clark’s illness entirely — a silence that, set against the three other accounts, marks the division of labor between the captains on this day. Read as a set, the four entries show the Three Forks not as a single observed event but as a place reconstructed from four overlapping fields of attention: the surveyor’s, the patient’s, the sergeant’s, and the private’s.

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Geography and Latitude vs. Labor and Weather

Gass writes in the compressed, official register of a sergeant accustomed to summarizing for a military audience. He folds two days into a single paragraph, notes the captains’ scientific work, and gestures southwest toward a snow-capped mountain the party expects to skirt:

From this valley we can discover a large mountain with snow on it, towards the south-west; and expect to pass by the northwest end of it. Capt. Lewis had a meridian altitude here, which gave 45 22 34 .5 north latitude.

Whitehouse, by contrast, opens with weather and ends with weather, bracketing the day in sensory detail Gass omits entirely. Where Gass simply states the men were “employed in airing the baggage, dressing skins and hunting,” Whitehouse particularizes the scene — a bower built over the ailing Clark, lame men nursing sore feet, a thundershower that “cooled the air much.” His entry is the longer and more textured of the two, and it preserves details no other narrator on this date supplies.

What Each Man Notices

Gass alone records Sacagawea’s identification of the campsite as the place of her capture, attributing the information directly to her:

Our squaw informed us, that it was at this place she had been taken prisoner by the Grossventers 4 or 5 years ago.

This corroborates Lewis’s more elaborate account of the same disclosure, though Gass uses the older anglicized ethnonym “Grossventers” (Gros Ventres) where Lewis writes “Minnetares of the Knife river.” Both refer to the Hidatsa raiding party. Gass’s matter-of-fact phrasing — “4 or 5 years ago” — echoes Lewis’s “five years since” closely enough to suggest he heard the captains discussing it, but the diction is his own.

Whitehouse, remarkably, does not mention Sacagawea or the capture at all. His silence is characteristic: throughout the journals he tends to record what the enlisted men did rather than what the captains learned. Instead he tells us something neither Gass nor Lewis bothers to note — that one of the hunters had scouted up the South fork (the Gallatin) and found it smaller than the Madison and Jefferson, “which are near of a Size.” He also offers a rare glimpse of his own assigned role:

I am employed makeing the chief part of the cloathing for the party.

This is the kind of self-disclosure Gass never permits himself. Whitehouse positions himself as the party’s tailor; Gass positions himself as a recorder of collective activity.

Convergence and Divergence

Both men note the dressing of skins and the hunting, and both register Clark’s illness — Gass with clinical brevity (“Capt. Clarke still continued unwell”), Whitehouse with sympathy and a concrete detail (“we built a bowrey for his comfort”). Their hunt counts differ slightly: Whitehouse tallies seven or eight deer plus two elk, while Gass gives no count at all, a typical pattern in which the private supplies the granular numbers the sergeant elides.

Read together, the two entries demonstrate the complementary value of multiple enlisted journals. Gass abstracts; Whitehouse particularizes. Gass attends to the captains’ science and to Sacagawea’s testimony; Whitehouse attends to the body of the camp — its fatigues, its sore feet, its showers, its needles and skins. Neither alone would give us the day, but together they place the reader at the Three Forks on the eve of the Shoshone search, in a camp simultaneously historic and ordinary.

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Three Registers, One Camp

Clark’s entry is the briefest he could plausibly write. He notes the weather, his own convalescence, the latitude derived from two meridian altitudes, and the men’s labor:

A fair morning wind from the North I feel my Self something better to day, made some Celestial observations took two Merdn. altitudes which gave for Latd. 45° 22′ 34″ N men all dressing Skins &c.

The terseness reflects both his weakened state — Lewis confirms he is “perfectly clear of fever but still very languid” — and Clark’s general preference for the cartographer’s economy: position, weather, condition of the party.

Whitehouse, writing as an enlisted man, expands Clark’s skeleton with the practical detail of camp life. He echoes the latitude reading almost exactly (“45°, 22″, 34″ 5/10 North”), suggesting he had access to the captains’ figures or copied them from a shared source. He then supplies measurements absent from both officers’ entries — the widths of the three forks at sixty, sixty, and forty yards — and closes with the hunters’ return: two fat buck deer and “a curious long leged redish couloured crain.”

The Sandhill Crane: Whitehouse’s Curiosity, Lewis’s Specimen

That crane is the day’s most telling cross-narrator artifact. Whitehouse sees it as a curiosity, worth a single descriptive line. Lewis devotes a full paragraph to it, identifying the bird, observing its behavior, and staging a small drama of capture and release:

the hunters brought in a living young sandhill crane it has nearly obtained it’s growth but cannot fly; they had pursued it and caught it in the meadows. it’s colour is precisely that of the red deer.

Lewis’s eye for comparative coloration — matching the juvenile crane’s plumage to the long-tailed red deer he has just described — is characteristic of his naturalist’s habit of cross-referencing species within a single entry. He continues:

this young animal is very ferce and strikes a severe blow with his beak; after amusing myself with it I had it set at liberty and it moved off apparently much pleased with being releived from his captivity.

The anthropomorphic flourish (“much pleased”) is uncharacteristic of Lewis’s usually clinical descriptions and hints at the affection the captain felt for the bird after “amusing” himself with it. Whitehouse, by contrast, registers no such interaction — the crane in his account is simply brought into camp with the venison, an item of game rather than a subject of observation.

Lewis’s Catalogue of the Plains

Where Clark records position and Whitehouse records yield, Lewis records ecosystem. The same entry sweeps from deer to crane to fish (“some of which we take to be trout but they will not bite at any bate we can offer them”) to kingfishers, summer ducks, mallards with their young, grasshoppers, crickets, and finally a remarkable note on the prairie ant:

there is also in these plains a large ant with a redish brown body and legs, and a black head and abdomen; they construct little perimids of small gravel in a conic shape, about 10 or 12 inches high without a mixture of sticks and with but little earth.

Neither Clark nor Whitehouse mentions the ants, the kingfishers, or the absent summer duck. Lewis even back-corrects his own record, noting that the mallard ducklings were “first seen with their young on the 20th inst. and I forgot to note it.” This impulse — to retroactively repair the natural history of the journey — is entirely his own and finds no parallel in his companions’ entries for the day.

Patterns of Borrowing and Independent Detail

The shared latitude figure between Clark and Whitehouse confirms what scholars have long observed: the enlisted journalists drew on the captains’ navigational data. Yet Whitehouse’s river-width measurements and his color description of the crane (“redish couloured”) are independent contributions, not derivable from either captain’s entry as preserved. The day at the Three Forks thus shows the expedition’s documentary apparatus working in three modes at once — Clark’s positional shorthand, Lewis’s encyclopedic field notebook, and Whitehouse’s hybrid of borrowed figures and firsthand camp reportage.

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The August 4 record splits cleanly along a line of responsibility. Lewis, ranging ahead with a small party, produces by far the longest and most cartographic entry — a careful reconstruction of bearings (S.E. by E., then S.E., then S.W.), creek widths in yards, and a hydrological argument about which fork to follow. He inspects the confluence where a 50-yard “bould rappid & clear stream” comes in from the northwest and meets a gentler middle fork, and reasons from water temperature and turbidity:

its water is much warmer than that of the rappid fork and somewhat turbid, from which I concluded that it had it’s source at a greater distance in the mountains and passed through an opener country than the other.

On that inference alone Lewis writes a note recommending Clark take the middle fork, and leaves it on a pole at the forks. Clark, meanwhile, records none of this geography — because he has not yet reached the forks. His entry is brief and physical:

haul the Canoes over the rapids, which Suckceed each other every two or three hundred yards and between the water rapid oblige to towe & walke on Stones the whole day except when we have poleing men wet all day Sore feet &c.

Clark also notes he could not walk on shore because of a “turner” (tumor/boil) on his ankle — a small medical detail absent from every other entry.

The Sergeants and the Note That Wasn’t Yet Written

Ordway and Whitehouse, traveling with Clark’s main party, describe finding an earlier Lewis note — the one left August 2 or 3, not the pole-note Lewis writes this day. Their accounts are nearly identical in sequence and phrasing, consistent with the well-documented pattern of Whitehouse copying from or sharing source material with Ordway. Compare Ordway’s

Some of the mountains near the River has been burned by the natives Some time ago. the pine timber timber killed the cotten timber in some of the R. bottoms killd & dry also

with Whitehouse’s

Some of the Mountains near the River on L. S. has been burned by the natives Some time ago. The timber killed. not So much timber on the River as below.

The shared observations — burned mountainsides, two deer killed by the hunter, a goose and a duck taken, 15 miles made, camp on the south side among dry timber and rose bushes — track so closely that the entries function as a single sergeant’s-eye account in two hands. Whitehouse compresses; Ordway expands with beaver ponds and red willows.

Gass, the third sergeant, departs from this pair entirely. His entry is the only one that describes a separate event: ascending what he believes is the correct branch, climbing a high knob, realizing from the timber line that the river had forked below his position, recrossing, finding the north branch unnavigable, descending to the confluence, and leaving his own note for Clark — directing him to take the left hand branch. Gass is evidently with Lewis’s advance party, and his account of leaving a directional note dovetails with Lewis’s pole-note but adds the detail of the false ascent and the high-knob reconnaissance that Lewis omits.

What Emerges Only From the Composite

No single narrator captures August 4 whole. Lewis gives the geography and the reasoning behind the fork decision but says nothing of the labor downstream. Clark gives the labor and his ankle but knows nothing yet of the forks ahead. Ordway and Whitehouse fix the day’s mileage, game, and landscape — burned slopes, dead cottonwoods, beaver sign — that neither captain bothers to record. Gass alone preserves the false start up the wrong branch and the second note left at the confluence.

Read together, the entries also expose a slow-motion problem the expedition cannot yet see: Lewis is staking the route on a note pinned to a pole, written from inferences about water temperature, while Clark is still grinding upstream a day or more behind, wet to the waist, hauling on cordelles. The decision about which fork to ascend — which will shortly become the Beaverhead question — is being made unilaterally and transmitted by paper. Lewis’s confidence in his hydrological reasoning, Gass’s contradictory directive (“left hand branch”), and Clark’s ignorance of either note compose, in retrospect, a small archive of the communication strain that defined the expedition’s approach to the Continental Divide.

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The expedition reached the Three Forks on July 25, 1805, a navigational turning point in the journey west. Lewis named the three streams for President Thomas Jefferson, Secretary of State James Madison, and Secretary of the Treasury Albert Gallatin. The party camped here for several days, resting and recording observations while Sacagawea recognized the country as the territory of her Shoshone people, from whom she had been taken years earlier — information that would shortly help the Corps secure the horses needed to cross the Bitterroots. Paxson painted the canvas in 1912, three years after completing his best-known work, the mural Custer’s Last Stand, and during a period when he was producing a sustained body of paintings devoted to the Lewis and Clark Expedition for Montana civic and commercial patrons.

Edgar Samuel Paxson (1852–1919) moved from New York to Montana in 1877 and spent decades interviewing surviving participants of frontier events, collecting Indigenous and military artifacts, and building a reputation as the state’s foremost narrative painter. His Lewis and Clark series, executed in the years surrounding the expedition’s centennial, remains the most ambitious pictorial treatment of the journey by a Montana-based artist. The painting is held by the Montana Historical Society in Helena and is associated with the Three Forks community, where the confluence is preserved as Missouri Headwaters State Park. The work is frequently reproduced in scholarship and interpretive material concerning the expedition’s passage through Montana.

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