The journals kept on 20 January 1805 at Fort Mandan offer an unusually clear illustration of how the expedition’s four diarists divided their attention. Patrick Gass attends to natural history and the traffic of fur-company employees; Joseph Whitehouse turns ethnographer; William Clark records a small domestic dispute inside the fort; John Ordway’s surviving fragment notes only the local abundance of corn. Read together, the entries sketch a single winter day from four very different vantage points.
Naming the Prairie Badger
Gass’s entry concerns the return of hunters and a visit from two North West Company men quartered at the Hidatsa (“Grossventers”) villages. His interest is lexical and zoological:
Two men belonging to the N. W. company, who stay at the Grossventers village, came to the fort. They say this animal which the French call a prarow, or brarow, is a species of the badger.
The word Gass records — brarow, from French blaireau — is one of several Franco-Canadian terms the captains and their sergeants were absorbing from the traders who passed through Fort Mandan that winter. Gass, a carpenter by training and the most plainspoken of the journalists, frequently uses such encounters to clarify nomenclature; here he resolves an identification (the “prarow” as a kind of badger) that Lewis would later treat at much greater length in his scientific descriptions. Notably, none of the other three narrators mentions the visit of the North West Company men at all.
Whitehouse Among the Mandans
Whitehouse, by contrast, devotes his entry to a ceremony observed by men who had gone up to the Mandan villages. His account stands almost alone in the day’s record as a piece of sustained ethnographic observation:
when they had done eating they gave a bowl of victuls to a buffalows head which they worshiped, & S? Eat this So that the live ones may come in that we may git a Supply of meat.
The note rehearses, in compressed form, the buffalo-calling rite that Lewis and Clark would describe more fully elsewhere in the winter journals. Whitehouse’s editorial coda — that the Mandans hold “Strange & uncommon Ideas, but verry Ignorant of our forms & customs, but quick & Sensible in their own way” — is characteristic of his register: condescending in framing, but careful enough in description to preserve the ritual logic (feeding the head so the living animals will come). Whitehouse is the only narrator on this date who steps outside the fort walls in his prose. The editor’s note appended to the manuscript, observing a half-page blank “across which a line is drawn to indicate the break in time,” reminds readers that Whitehouse’s surviving fair copy was assembled later and may incorporate material recollected or recopied from the captains.
Inside the Fort: Clark’s Domestic Scene
Clark’s entry ignores both badgers and buffalo heads. He fixes instead on a quarrel:
a miss understanding took place between the two inturpeters on account of their Squars, one of the Squars of Shabownes Squars being Sick, I ordered my Servent to, give her Some froot Stewed and tee at dift Tims which was the Cause of the misundstd
The two interpreters are Toussaint Charbonneau and René Jusseaume; the sick woman is one of Charbonneau’s wives — possibly Sacagawea, then in the late stages of her pregnancy, though Clark does not name her. The detail that Clark’s enslaved man, York (“my Servent”), was sent with stewed fruit and tea is the kind of household particular Clark notices that the enlisted journalists do not. Ordway’s surviving line for the day — only the phrase “considerable corn” — suggests his fuller entry has been lost or truncated in transmission, but it points toward the same interior economy of the fort: provisions, trade, and food.
Patterns Across the Four Entries
No two of the four journalists overlap on a single fact. Gass alone notes the North West Company visitors; Whitehouse alone reports the buffalo-head ceremony; Clark alone records the interpreters’ quarrel and the stewed fruit; Ordway’s fragment alone gestures at corn. This divergence is itself instructive. By late January the Fort Mandan routine had become familiar enough that each diarist felt free to record what struck him personally rather than transcribing a shared captain’s log, as the enlisted men sometimes did on the trail. The result is a composite day that no single journal preserves — a reminder of why cross-narrator reading remains essential to reconstructing the expedition’s winter at the Mandan villages.
