September 26, 1804 marked a deliberate de-escalation after the previous day’s near-violent confrontation with the Teton Sioux near present-day Pierre, South Dakota. The captains accepted an invitation to remain a night so that, in Clark’s phrasing, the chiefs could “let their Womin & Boys See the Boat, and Suffer them to Show us some friendship.” Three members of the expedition left accounts of what followed: Clark from inside the council lodge, Ordway from a middle vantage as a sergeant who attended the evening dance, and Whitehouse from the boat and the village periphery. Read together, the entries form a layered ethnographic record in which register, access, and attention diverge sharply.
The White Robe Ceremony: Three Angles on a Single Event
All three narrators describe the moment when warriors carried a captain to the council lodge on a white-dressed buffalo robe. The differences are instructive. Whitehouse, watching from the boat, compresses the ceremony into a brief sequence:
when the Indians Saw the officers comming they Spread a buffaloe Robe on the Ground and they Set down on it, then it was taken up by 4 warrie[r]s and carried to the Grand chiefs lodge.
Ordway, who went ashore later in the evening, knows the gesture’s significance and supplies the number of bearers and an interpretive frame:
they Spread a Buffaloe robe dressed white on the Ground for him to Git on as soon as he landed he Set on it 8 of the Savages carried him to the lodge which is a Great Mark of friendship
Clark, the man on the robe, gives the fullest account — and the only first-person one:
about 5 oClock I was approached by 10 well Dressed young men with a neet Buffalow Roab which they Set down before me & requested me to get in they Carried me to ther Council Tents forming 3/4 Circle & Set me down betwn 2 Chefs where about 70 men were Seated in a circle
The bearer count drifts from four (Whitehouse) to eight (Ordway) to ten (Clark). Such discrepancies are typical of the expedition’s overlapping records and suggest that Ordway and Whitehouse are not copying Clark here but reporting independently from different distances. Only Clark describes the swan’s-down scattered beneath the raised pipe, the Spanish flag displayed beside the American one, and the roughly four hundred pounds of buffalo meat heaped in the center — details available only from inside the circle.
Ethnography and Register
Clark’s entry is the most ethnographically dense of the three, and its register shifts noticeably as he moves from boat to lodge. He opens with appraisal — the Teton men are “Spritely Small legs ille looking Set men” who “grease & Black themselves when they dress” — and praises the women’s “fine Teeth, High Cheek” before noting bitterly that they “are perfect Slaves to thier husbands.” Once inside the council, his prose slows into ceremonial reportage: the pipe pointed “to the heavens, the 4 quartrs and the earth,” the old man’s speech of approval, the great chief’s solemn harangue.
Ordway’s account is more domestic and culinary. He alone records that Lewis was given “fine Soup made of what they call white apples” — the prairie turnip (Psoralea esculenta) — and describes pemmican preparation with the precision of a man who ate it: “some dryed and pounded fine, the marrow of the Buffalow Bones, mixed together, which Eat verry well.” He also gives the clearest physical description of the encampment: “about 100 cabbins in nomber and all white, made of Buffalow hides dressed white one large one in the center, the lodge for the war dances.” Clark, by contrast, estimates lodges at “15 to 20 feet Diametr Stretched on Poles like a Sugar Loaf.”
The Mahar Captives and the Scalp Dance
Each narrator notes the recent Teton victory over the Omaha (“Mahar”), but their numbers and emphases differ. Ordway reports “Sixtyfive of the Sculps and 25 prisonrs Squaws,” with twenty-three more captives at a lodge upriver. Whitehouse gives the same scalp count and adds the striking detail that the scalps were “hung on Small poles, which ther women held in their hands when they danced.” Clark reports forty-eight prisoners and, characteristically, takes diplomatic action: “I advised the Chiefs to make peace with that nation and give up the Prisoners, if they intended to follow the words of their great father.”
The dance itself draws all three pens. Ordway describes the choreography most carefully — men forming a line, women on either side of the fire, the meeting at center, the rattle-shake and “houp.” Whitehouse times it (“untill one oclock”) and counts dancers (“about 80”). Clark’s entry, in the fragment preserved here, breaks off as the women come forward “highly decerated with the Scalps” — leaving the reader, as so often with the expedition’s journals, to triangulate the rest from his subordinates’ pages.
