The journal entries for 18 August 1806 offer one of the more striking examples of register disparity in the expedition’s late phase. Patrick Gass, John Ordway, and William Clark all describe the same stretch of the Missouri below the Mandan villages, the same high winds, and the same hunters’ returns — yet only Clark transcribes the cosmological narrative shared that evening by Sheheke, the Mandan chief traveling with the party to meet President Jefferson.
Parallel Tallies: Gass and Ordway
The Gass and Ordway entries are nearly interchangeable in structure and content. Gass notes that the party halted at ten o’clock after the hunters killed two deer, cooked venison for an hour, and that in the evening the men brought in “five or six more deer.” Ordway’s account is virtually a mirror:
about 8 A. M. we Set out and procd on about 1 P. M. our hunters killed two deer, the wind continued high towards evening Saw Some buffaloe we Camped below otter Creek N. S. the hunters killed 5 deer.
The match is close enough — two deer at midday, five at evening camp, persistent high wind — that the two sergeants appear to be working from a shared verbal report or, more likely, from the same end-of-day camp conversation. Ordway adds the geographic anchor (“below otter Creek”) and a glimpse of buffalo that Gass omits; Gass rounds the evening kill to “five or six,” a vagueness Ordway does not permit himself. Neither man mentions the Mandan chief, the parting of brothers on the beach, or the long evening’s storytelling.
Clark’s Expanded Field
Clark’s entry runs to many times the length of either sergeant’s. He opens with the same meteorological frame — “moderate rain last night, the wind of this morning from the S. E. as to cause the water to be So rough that we Could not proceed on untill 8 a.m.” — confirming Ordway’s 8 A.M. start. He confirms the hunters’ two midday deer and the four taken at evening camp (where Gass had written “five or six” and Ordway “5”). The numerical drift across the three accounts is small but instructive: Clark, with access to the hunters directly, gives the precise figure; Ordway rounds slightly; Gass rounds further.
What sets Clark apart is the scene on the beach at nine in the morning, when an Indian running along the shore proved to be the brother of the chief on board:
the Chief gave him a par of Legins and took an effectunate leave of his brother and we procedeed on
Neither Gass nor Ordway records this farewell, though both were aboard the small flotilla. The episode is the kind of human detail that sergeants’ logs routinely strip away in favor of distance, weather, and game.
The Origin Story Clark Alone Preserves
The most consequential divergence comes after dark. Clark camped opposite an old Mandan village near the Chisschetar River — the same site the expedition had passed on 20 October 1804 — and sat down with Sheheke, “the big white man Chiefe,” to inquire into Mandan tradition. The narrative Clark transcribes is among the earliest written records of Mandan cosmology by a non-Native observer:
he told me his nation first Came out of the ground where they had a great village. a grape vine grew down through the Earth to their village and they Saw light Some of their people assended by the grape vine upon the earth, and Saw Buffalow and every kind of animal also Grapes plumbs &c.
Clark continues the story through the climbing of the vine by men, women, and children, and the rupture caused by “a large big bellied woman” whose weight broke the vine, stranding the remainder underground. He notes parenthetically that “The Mandans beleive when they die that they return to this village” — a gloss that signals he understood the story as eschatology, not folklore.
He then turns immediately from cosmology to demography, recording Sheheke’s account that the Mandan once inhabited seven villages “as large as that and were full of people,” before “the Sieoux and Small pox killed the greater part of them.” The juxtaposition — origin narrative followed by epidemic depopulation — is Clark’s editorial choice, but it reflects the chief’s own framing of a people defined by both emergence and catastrophic loss.
That Gass and Ordway preserve none of this is not surprising: their journals across the expedition tend toward the operational. But the contrast on this particular date is unusually sharp. Without Clark’s entry, 18 August 1806 would survive as a windy day with seven deer. With it, the date becomes one of the expedition’s richer ethnographic moments — and a reminder that the captains’ journals frequently carry weight the sergeants’ do not.
