The visit of four Cheyenne (“Shar-ha” / “Chien” / “Shian”) emissaries to Fort Mandan, accompanying chiefs of the lower Mandan village, is recorded by three of the expedition’s narrators. Each entry is brief, but read together they reveal a clear hierarchy of access to information and a characteristic difference in register between the captain’s log and the enlisted men’s journals.
Clark’s Diplomatic Record
William Clark produces by far the fullest account, and his entry is essentially a diplomatic memorandum. He opens with a header note summarizing the day’s business — the arrival of “Several Mandan Chiefs and 4 Chyannes Inds. who Came with a pipe to the Mandans” — and then expands into a narrative of the council itself. The captains, he writes,
explained to them our intentions our views and advised them to be at peace, Gave them a flag for theire nation, Some Tobacco with a Speech to Deliver to their nation on theire return, also Sent by them a letter to Mrs. Tabbo & Gravoline, at the Ricares Village, to interseid in proventing Hostilities.
Clark alone records the geopolitical reach of the meeting. The Cheyenne visitors are being enlisted as couriers — carrying both a spoken speech to their own nation and a written letter southward to Pierre-Antoine Tabeau and Joseph Gravelines among the Arikaras, with explicit instructions to intercede against Sioux–Arikara hostilities. His header note makes the threat behind the diplomacy plain: the Arikaras and Sioux are being warned “what they might depend on if they would not open their ears.” Clark closes with the small courtesies of the day — “Some fiew Small presents,” the showing of “many Curisossties” — and a meteorological note that the river rose an inch.
Ordway and Gass: The View from the Ranks
John Ordway and Patrick Gass, both sergeants, record the same event in radically compressed form. Ordway notes simply that
a nomber of the Shian or dog Indians came from the village to visit us. we gave them victuals & used them friendly, our officers Gave them Some tobacco & a fiew Small articles of Goods.
His phrase “dog Indians” preserves a contemporary gloss on the Cheyenne ethnonym that neither Clark nor Gass uses. Ordway sees the encounter from the perspective of the garrison’s hospitality — food, friendly usage, the distribution of small gifts — and explicitly distinguishes between what “we” (the men) did and what “our officers” did. The diplomatic substance of the council, the speeches, the flag, the letter to Tabeau and Gravelines — none of this appears.
Gass is briefer still, and his entry is structurally different: it bundles December 2 with the following several days into a weekly summary. He records that
A party of the Chien Indians with some of the Mandans came to the fort; they appeared civil and good natured.
He then moves immediately to the work schedule of the 3rd through 6th and to the freezing of the river. Gass’s interest is the fort itself — labor, weather, the ice an inch and a half thick by morning. The Cheyenne visit is a single sentence of social characterization (“civil and good natured”) with no mention of presents, speeches, or pipe.
Patterns Across the Three Entries
Several cross-narrator patterns emerge. First, only Clark records the pipe of peace, the flag, and the written correspondence with Tabeau and Gravelines — the elements that make this a council rather than a casual visit. The sergeants either did not witness or did not consider worth recording the formal diplomatic acts conducted by the captains. Second, the three narrators converge on tobacco and small gifts as worth noting; Ordway’s and Clark’s accounts agree closely on this point, suggesting that the distribution of goods was the most visible part of the day for the rank and file.
Third, the entries show no textual borrowing among the three. Ordway and Gass are not copying from Clark, nor from each other: their vocabulary (“dog Indians,” “Chien,” “Shar-ha”), their framing (hospitality, weather, diplomacy), and their temporal scope (single day vs. weekly bundle) all differ. Where many Fort Mandan-period entries by the sergeants closely shadow the captains’ phrasing, December 2 finds each narrator working independently from his own vantage — a useful reminder that the expedition’s documentary record is genuinely multi-vocal even when its narrators stand within the same palisade.
