The 19th of November 1804 finds the Corps of Discovery settling into winter quarters at Fort Mandan in present-day North Dakota. Ice runs in the Missouri, men move into their newly completed huts, and a hunting pirogue returns laden with meat. Three journalists — William Clark, John Ordway, and Patrick Gass — record the day, yet their accounts diverge in ways that illuminate how the expedition’s documentary record was actually compiled.
Counting the Same Pirogue, Reaching Different Totals
The most striking cross-narrator discrepancy concerns the hunters’ haul. Clark, writing in his field notes, is precise and consistent across both of his entries for the day:
our Perogue of Hunters arrive with 32 Deer, 12 Elk & a Buffalow, all of this meat we had hung up in a Smoke house, a timeley supply
Ordway, by contrast, records a markedly larger and differently composed return:
abᵗ 3 o.C. P.M. our hunters arived with the pearogue loaded with meat consisting of 5 buffalow 11 Elk & 30 Deer also Several kinds of Small Game of which they brought the Skins
Where Clark logs a single buffalo, Ordway counts five; where Clark gives 32 deer and 12 elk, Ordway gives 30 and 11. Ordway alone notes the time of arrival (around 3 p.m.) and the small game whose skins were preserved. The discrepancy is too large to be a simple transcription slip and suggests the two men were tallying independently — perhaps Clark recording the official commissary count of large meat animals while Ordway, as sergeant, noted what he personally observed being unloaded, including smaller fare.
Gass on a Different River Entirely
Patrick Gass’s entry for the same date presents a puzzle of another kind. While Clark and Ordway are firmly at Fort Mandan describing winter labor and meat storage, Gass writes of moving water, bottomlands, and a sequence of named tributaries:
passed large bottoms on both sides of the river covered with timber. We saw some buffaloe swimming the river and killed two of them… a creek, called Elm creek, comes in on the south side, and two miles above another creek, called Wash creek, falls in on the same side. About two miles further we passed another creek, called Night creek, where we encamped on the south side.
Gass describes the "Sioux-crossing-place of the three rivers," a landmark well downstream of the Mandan villages. His narrative belongs chronologically to an earlier point in the journey. This is a well-known feature of the published Gass journal: the 1807 edition, edited by David McKeehan from Gass’s original notes, smoothed and redistributed entries, and the dating in the printed text often does not align tightly with the day-by-day records kept by Clark and Ordway. The contrast on November 19 is a vivid case study — where the two manuscript journalists describe a static fort, the published Gass volume is still moving upriver.
Detail, Register, and What Each Man Notices
Beyond the numerical and geographic divergences, register distinguishes the three narrators. Ordway is the practical quartermaster: he reports that the men "dobbed the Store & Smoak house," that "all hands employed at different Sort of work," and that the meat was placed "on poles in the Roofs of our meat & Smoak houses." His entry is a labor log.
Clark’s two-part entry mixes the immediate ("a Cold day the ice Continue to run") with retrospective insertions clearly added later — most notably the parenthetical note that Lewis "visit the Me ne tar rees, the 25th and returned the 27th of Nov." with intelligence about North West Company and Hudson’s Bay Company traders, naming the clerks "Mr. La Roche & Mc Kinzey." This forward-looking interpolation, written after the fact into the November 19 entry, shows Clark using the field notebook as a working ledger to be amended with later information rather than as a sealed daily record.
Clark also tantalizes with what he does not write down: "Several little Indian aneckdts. told me to day" — a placeholder noting that stories were exchanged with the Mandan visitors who were "here all day," without preserving their content. Ordway, focused on labor, mentions no such visitors at all.
Read together, the three entries demonstrate that no single journal can stand for the expedition’s record on any given date. The numerical disagreement between Clark and Ordway, the chronological displacement of Gass, and Clark’s habit of layering later intelligence onto earlier pages all argue for the kind of cross-narrator collation that turns a day’s journals into something approaching documentary history.
