The entries of October 25, 1804, capture the Corps of Discovery within a day’s travel of the Mandan villages on the upper Missouri. All three narrators—William Clark, Sergeant John Ordway, and Sergeant Patrick Gass—describe the same sequence of events: an early start under a southerly breeze, the passage of timbered bottoms and abandoned village sites, a dinner halt during which the expedition’s accompanying Arikara chief is sent across the river to parley with mounted Mandans, and an evening encampment where a Mandan visitor returns with him. Yet the three accounts differ markedly in scope, ethnographic curiosity, and prose register, offering a useful case study in how rank and role shaped expedition record-keeping.
Clark’s Ethnographic Density
Clark’s entry is by far the longest and most detailed. Where the sergeants note simply that natives appeared along the shore, Clark anchors the day in a layered geography of Mandan settlement, identifying the abandoned third village on a forty-foot eminence and a more recently evacuated site only six years old:
passed (1) the 3rd old Village of the Mandans which has been Desd. for many years, This village was Situated on an eminance of about 40 foot above the water on the L. S. back for Several miles is a butifull plain
Clark also gathers and records intelligence the sergeants omit entirely: a Sioux raid on Hidatsa (“Big belley”) horses, a retaliatory killing by the Assiniboine, and the recent murder of a Frenchman traveling toward the British post on the Assiniboine River. Most striking is his sustained attention to the visiting Mandan, the son of a deceased principal chief, whose missing fingers prompt a passage of cultural ethnography:
this man has his two little fingers off-; on inqureing the Cause, was told it was Customary for this nation to Show their greaf by Some testimony of pain, and that it was not uncommon for them to take off 2 Smaller fingers of the hand and Some times more with ther marks of Savage effection
Clark closes with a medical roster—Reuben Field with rheumatism in his neck, Pierre Cruzatte similarly afflicted in the legs, and a hint that Clark himself feels “slight Simptoms” of the same disorder. None of this appears in the other journals.
Ordway and Gass: Parallel Compressions
The two sergeants’ entries are remarkably similar in structure and even in phrasing, raising the familiar question of mutual influence among the expedition’s enlisted journalists. Ordway writes:
fine breeze from the S. Sailed on passed a handsom high prarie on S. S. where their was formerly a village of the Rickarrees nation, we Saw a nomber of the natives Strung along the Shore on horse back looking at us.
Gass records the same opening beats:
sail early with a fair wind. Passed a beautiful bottom on the south side, and hills on the north. A great many of the natives, some on horseback and some on foot appeared on the hills on the north side, hallooing and singing.
Both sergeants identify the 2 o’clock dinner halt, the inability to bring the boat to the north shore on account of shallow water or sand beaches, the dispatch of the Arikara chief by canoe, and the return of a Mandan companion to camp. The sequencing is virtually identical. Yet the two diverge in small but telling ways. Ordway misidentifies the abandoned site as Arikara (“Rickarrees”), where Clark correctly assigns it to the Mandans. Gass, by contrast, makes no ethnonymic claim about the old village at all, but adds a sensory detail neither colleague preserves—the natives on the hills were “hallooing and singing.” Gass’s polished syntax (“a beautiful bottom”) reflects the heavier editorial hand applied to his journal in its 1807 publication, while Ordway’s looser orthography (“nomber,” “Timbred,” “remd all night”) preserves the texture of a field diary.
Register and Responsibility
The contrasts here track the captains-versus-sergeants division of labor visible throughout the journals. Clark, responsible for diplomatic intelligence, geographic survey, and ethnographic observation, produces an entry that fuses all three. Ordway and Gass, charged primarily with a daily log of the party’s movements, compress the same day into a navigable summary. The wind shift to the southwest that Clark records as blowing hard from eleven until three—an event consequential for sailing and for the cold evening that followed—goes unmentioned by both sergeants, as does the troublesome “riffle of rocks” navigated in the evening. Read together, the three entries demonstrate how the expedition’s documentary completeness depended on the layering of these registers: Clark’s analytic breadth, Ordway’s plain chronology, and Gass’s editorially smoothed narrative each preserve something the others lose.
