The entries of Patrick Gass, John Ordway, and William Clark for August 16, 1806, all describe the same hours at the Mandan villages: gifts exchanged, a chief recruited for the journey to Washington, and final arrangements with men leaving the Corps. Yet the three narrators produce three nearly incompatible accounts. Read together, they expose how rank, literacy, and proximity to council fires determined what an expedition journalist saw — and what he chose to write down.
The Captain’s Stage
Clark’s entry is by far the longest and most ceremonial of the three. He devotes most of his page to the formal presentation of the expedition’s swivel gun to the Hidatsa chief One Eye, staging the moment as theater:
I had the Swivel Charged and Collected the Chiefs in a circle around it and adressed them with great ceremoney.
Clark records his own speech at length, reproaches the chiefs for the killing of “the pore defenceless snake indians,” and transcribes responses from both Little Cherry and One Eye. He is also the only narrator to register a diplomatic setback: Little Crow’s last-minute refusal to descend the river, which Clark attributes to “a jellousy between himself and the principal Chief.” Clark’s journal here functions as an official council record — diplomatic minutes more than personal diary.
What Gass Saw From the Camp
Sergeant Gass, writing from the enlisted men’s vantage, reduces Clark’s elaborate ceremony to a single sentence: the captains “gave a small piece of ordnance to the Grossventres, which they appeared very fond of.” The swivel-gun speech, the reproaches, the chiefs’ replies — all vanish. In their place Gass records what the council circle did not: the texture of camp life, including pilfering that Clark omits entirely.
Yesterday and to-day, they stole several knives and spoons; and three powder horns, and two pouches, filled with ammunition.
Gass also notes the practical disposition of personnel that Clark mentions only glancingly — the discharge of the man returning upriver with the hunters, and the gift of the blacksmith’s tools to the interpreter “who intends settling among these Indians.” Where Clark sees diplomacy, Gass sees logistics and losses. His phrase “some of these Indians are very kind and obliging” set against “others very troublesome” preserves a register of frontier ambivalence that the captain’s ceremonial prose smooths over.
Ordway’s Domestic Eye
Ordway’s brief entry is the most distinctive of the three. He alone notices the families. While Clark identifies Big White only as a chief and Gass calls him “the Big-White,” Ordway records the household that will travel with him:
Mr Jessom and their wives and three children Mr Jessom two and the Big White and one very handsom children one of Mr jessoms has had a little Scooling at the N. W. Company.
This is the only mention across the three journals of the children, of the interpreter Jusseaume’s wives, or of the boy’s prior schooling at a North West Company post. Ordway also notes ordinary commerce — “good robes and mockasons” traded that morning — that neither Clark nor Gass bothers to record. Where Clark stages a council and Gass tallies thefts, Ordway watches the people who will actually be aboard the pirogues tomorrow.
Three Documents, One Day
The cross-narrator pattern on this date is unusually clean. None of the three appears to copy from another: Gass’s vocabulary of “ordnance” and “Commanding Officers” is independent of Clark’s vocabulary of “Swivel” and “ceremoney,” and Ordway’s family roster has no analog in either. Each man wrote from his own position in the camp’s hierarchy. Clark, conducting the council, recorded speeches. Gass, supervising men and stores, recorded discipline and supply. Ordway, with apparently the freest eye, recorded the human composition of the delegation that would now carry the expedition’s diplomacy eastward. Read in isolation, each entry would mislead a researcher about what August 16, 1806, contained. Read together, they reconstruct a fuller departure than any single journal preserves.
