The entries dated December 20, 1804, capture a quiet but telling moment in the construction of Fort Mandan. Three narrators — Clark, Ordway, and Whitehouse — converge on a single subject: the unseasonable warmth that allowed work on the fort’s pickets to continue. A fourth entry, attributed to Patrick Gass, describes a day on the river with hunters bringing in deer and a wounded white bear — a scene plainly inconsistent with the expedition’s winter encampment, and almost certainly a misalignment in the printed Gass journal rather than a genuine December 20 observation.
Convergence on the Pickets
Clark, as commanding officer, frames the day in terms of conditions and consequences. He notes the wind, takes a thermometer reading, and connects the weather directly to the labor it enables:
The wind from the N W a moderate day, the Thermometr 37° above 0, which givs an oppertunity of putting up our pickets next the river, nothing remarkable took place to Day river fall a little
Clark’s register is administrative. The temperature is a measurement, the picket work is a project, and the falling river is a navigational note. His characteristic closing phrase — nothing remarkable took place — is itself a kind of remark, a commander’s shorthand for a day that produced no incident worth reporting up a chain of command.
Sergeant Ordway, writing from the perspective of a non-commissioned officer overseeing fatigue parties, compresses the same day into a single line:
pleasant day. we continued Setting up the pickets &.C.
Where Clark gives a number (37°), Ordway gives an adjective (pleasant). Where Clark explains causation — the warmth permitted the work — Ordway simply reports the work continuing. The &.C. is telling: it acknowledges other tasks without enumerating them, the practiced economy of a sergeant’s daybook.
Private Whitehouse, lowest in rank among the day’s diarists, supplies the most experiential detail of the three:
a quite warm day. the Snow melted fast. we continued on our work as usal.
Whitehouse alone notices the snow melting — a sensory observation that neither Clark’s thermometer nor Ordway’s pleasant quite conveys. His phrase as usal also flattens the picket work into ongoing routine, suggesting that by December 20 the construction had become unremarkable to the men performing it. The three entries together form a small hierarchy of perspective: the officer’s measurement, the sergeant’s task summary, the private’s bodily impression of the thaw.
The Gass Anomaly
The entry printed under December 20 in Gass’s published journal does not fit Fort Mandan in any season. It describes hunters returning to the boat, passing a creek and a bluff, encamping on the south side, and tallying fourteen deer along with a goat, a wolf, and a wounded large white bear:
We this day, saw a number of buffaloe, and goats on the sides of the hills. We encamped on the south side, and our hunters came in having killed 14 deer, a goat and a wolf; and one of them wounded a large white bear.
By December 20, 1804, the party had been stationary at Fort Mandan for over a month; they were not encamping nightly, not passing creeks, and not engaging grizzlies. The references to a moving boat and a white (grizzly) bear point to the spring or summer of 1805, after the expedition resumed its ascent of the Missouri. The misalignment likely reflects the well-known editorial liberties taken by David McKeehan, who prepared Gass’s journal for publication in 1807, or a pagination slip in the source transcription. For comparative purposes, this passage should be set aside; the genuine December 20 record at Fort Mandan rests with Clark, Ordway, and Whitehouse.
Pattern and Routine
Stripped of the misplaced Gass passage, the day’s record demonstrates how the three remaining narrators triangulate a single ordinary event. None copies another verbatim, but all three independently identify the warmth as the day’s defining feature and the pickets as its defining activity. Clark quantifies, Ordway summarizes, Whitehouse describes. The pattern recurs throughout the Fort Mandan winter: on uneventful days, the captains’ journals supply data, the sergeants’ supply task lists, and the privates’ supply texture. December 20, 1804, is a clean instance of that division of narrative labor — a day when nothing remarkable happened, and four very different writers proved it in four very different ways.
