The September 1, 1806 entries from William Clark, John Ordway, and Patrick Gass describe a single tense encounter near the mouth of the Niobrara (Quicurre) River — but the three accounts differ so sharply in length, detail, and tone that they offer a compact case study in how rank, role, and prior experience shaped expedition record-keeping.
Three Scales of Telling
Gass, the carpenter-sergeant whose published journal favors brevity, compresses the entire episode into a single sentence:
we set out early, and about to o’clock met nine of the Yonk-tin band of the Sioux nation of Indians on the south side of the river. We halted and gave them some corn, and then proceeded on with an unfavorable wind.
There is no gunfire in Gass’s telling, no alarm, no keg. The encounter is reduced to its diplomatic outcome: a meeting, a gift of corn, a continuation. Gass also notes — and Ordway and Clark both echo, though Clark’s surviving fragment cuts off — that the night’s camp coincided with the site where the captains had treated with the Sioux on August 31, 1804. For Gass, that geographic symmetry is the day’s organizing fact.
Ordway, the orderly sergeant, writes a middle-register account. He preserves the sequence of fear and relief that Gass omits: the nine Indians emerging from a thicket, five with guns and the rest with bows; the signal to land; the deliberate decision to float past to an open point; the volley of shots; Clark’s instant response with ten men; and the discovery that the firing had been aimed at a discarded keg.
as Soon as we halted we heard several guns fire we expecting that the Indians were fireing at our hunters who were behind Capt Clark Instantly run up with 10 men but soon returned with the Indians and found that they had been fireing at a kegg we had thrown out above
Ordway’s account is the most efficient narrative version — cause, alarm, resolution — and includes the practical details a sergeant would track: a bushel of corn and some ribbon distributed, a fat elk killed on an island, mosquitoes in the evening.
Clark’s Long Memory
Clark’s entry runs many times the length of either sergeant’s and reveals why this minor incident loomed large for him. Where Ordway reports that the party expected Tetons, Clark dwells on that expectation and on what he was prepared to do about it:
I calld out 15 men and ran up with a fill deturmination to Cover them if possible let the number of the indians be what they might.
And later, after the Yanktons are identified:
I had went up with a full intention to kill them all if they had been tetons & fired on the Canoe as we first expected, but finding them Yanktons and good men we were glad to See them and take them by the hand as faithfull Children
This is the unmistakable shadow of the September 1804 confrontation with the Teton Sioux at the Bad River — an encounter Clark had never psychologically closed. Ordway notes the initial fear of Tetons in passing; Clark devotes paragraphs to it. The captain alone records the diplomatic recovery in detail: the Yanktons saluting the Mandan chief traveling with the party, the shared pipes, the speech in which one man affirmed that the Yanktons had “opened their years” since receiving a medal from the captains, and Clark’s inquiry about whether their chiefs had gone downriver with Pierre Dorion.
What Each Narrator Sees
The differential reporting is instructive. Gass registers geography and gifts. Ordway registers sequence and supply. Clark registers threat assessment, command decisions, and political continuity with the 1804 councils — the materials of an official report. Only Clark names the Yankton man recognized as the brother of “young Durion’s wife,” a kinship detail that mattered for ongoing diplomacy. Only Ordway specifies the elk and the ribbon. Only Gass anchors the camp to its 1804 predecessor by explicit calendar reference.
Read together, the three entries also confirm one another on the core facts — nine Indians, guns fired at a floating keg, Clark leading the response party, the Yankton identification — while disagreeing on the count of men Clark took with him (Ordway: ten; Clark: fifteen). Such small numerical drift is characteristic of expedition cross-checking and is itself a reminder that even eyewitnesses to the same half-hour produced records shaped by where they stood, what they feared, and what they had been trained to write down.
