The hunting expedition Captain William Clark led from Fort Mandan on December 14, 1804 produced three surviving accounts—one from Clark himself and two from his sergeants, Patrick Gass and John Ordway. The party set out in pursuit of buffalo but found the herds had abandoned the river bottoms, and the hunters had to settle for two deer. Read together, the entries demonstrate how each narrator filtered the same day through a distinct vantage point and prose register.
The Captain’s View from the Field
Clark, writing as the leader of the hunting party, naturally provides the most detail about the hunt itself. He opens with weather observations precise enough to include the thermometer reading:
a fine morning. wind from the S. E. the murckerey Stood at ‘0’ this morning I went with a party of men down the river 18 miles to hunt Buffalow, Saw two Bulls too pore to kill, the Cows and large gangues haveing left the River
Only Clark records the distance traveled (eighteen miles) and the crucial detail that the two bulls they did encounter were judged “too pore to kill”—a hunter’s economic calculation absent from both sergeants’ accounts. He also offers the natural-historical observation that the cows and “large gangues” had departed the river corridor, a fact the expedition would later confirm shaped winter subsistence on the upper Missouri.
Two Sergeants, Two Registers
Gass and Ordway both remained at Fort Mandan and therefore reconstructed the day’s events from the five hunters who returned that evening. Yet their treatments diverge sharply. Gass, whose published 1807 journal was edited from his field notes, offers a terse, almost ledger-like summary:
Captain Clarke and fourteen men went out to hunt; and took the three sleds with them. In the evening five of them returned. Captain Clarke and the other 9 encamped out, and killed two deer. The snow fell about three inches deep.
Gass alone mentions the three sleds—a logistical detail consistent with his carpenter’s eye for equipment—and quantifies the snowfall at three inches. His count of the camping party (“the other 9”) differs from Ordway’s (“8 men”), a small discrepancy that hints at how quickly numbers blurred when reported secondhand at the fort.
Ordway, by contrast, embeds the hunt within the social life of the post:
a nomber of the Mandans came to See us. 14 of them eat in my Room at one time, the Big White dined with Cap* Lewis
This is information neither Clark (who was absent) nor Gass records. Ordway’s room hosting fourteen Mandan visitors, and the chief Sheheke—”the Big White”—dining with Captain Lewis, document the diplomatic intimacy that had developed between the expedition and the Mandan villages by mid-December. Ordway also identifies the camping location as “a Bottom of wood 8 or 10 m1 down the river from our Fort,” estimating roughly half the eighteen miles Clark himself reports—another reminder that distances communicated back to the fort were approximations.
Patterns Across the Three Hands
Several cross-narrator patterns emerge. First, none of the three sergeants’ or captains’ accounts here appears to be copied from another; each preserves details unique to its author’s vantage point. Gass does not echo Ordway’s social scene at the fort, and Ordway does not echo Gass’s sled inventory. This independence stands in contrast to other dates when the journals show clear textual borrowing.
Second, the weather is recorded by all three but in different idioms. Clark gives a thermometer reading and calls the morning “fine”; Gass measures snow depth; Ordway notes that snow “Set in” suddenly after Clark’s departure. Together the three observations sketch a fuller meteorological picture than any single entry provides.
Third, the absence of buffalo—the day’s central disappointment—registers differently in each text. Clark explains it ecologically (the herds have left the river). Ordway transmits it as news brought back by returning hunters. Gass omits the failure entirely, mentioning only the two deer that were killed. For a researcher reconstructing the expedition’s winter food supply, only a synoptic reading of all three entries reveals both the effort expended and its meager result.
