January 20, 1805, at Fort Mandan. Three published journals in this corpus record the day: Joseph Whitehouse, William Clark, and John Ordway. Patrick Gass has no published journal for this date here. The three who wrote do not share a scene. Whitehouse stays with men who walked up to the villages; Clark stays inside the palisade; Ordway’s surviving line is a single commodity.
Whitehouse at the villages
Whitehouse does not go, or does not say he went. “Some men went up to the villages,” and they came back with a report. The Mandan “used them verry well” and “gave them pleanty to eat.” After the meal, a bowl was set aside:
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 logic is in the offering: feed the head so living buffalo will come, and so the villages will have meat. Whitehouse then steps back from the rite into a judgment no one else writes this day:
Some of them & indeed the most of them have Strange & un- common Ideas, but verry Ignorant of our forms & customs, but quick & Sensible in their own way
Condescending in frame, exact enough to keep the prayer. He names no man, no interpreter, no illness at the fort. The printed manuscript, as Thwaites notes, leaves nearly half a page blank after the entry, a line drawn across the gap. This day’s Whitehouse is a short ethnographic paragraph and then a break.
Clark’s quarrel in the fort
Clark’s whole entry is weather, visitors, and a household dispute. “a Cold fair day Several Indians at the fort to day.” He does not describe a buffalo head. He does not send men to the villages in this sentence; the Indians have come to him. Then:
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 named household is Toussaint Charbonneau’s. Clark does not name the sick woman; one of Charbonneau’s wives, late in pregnancy in this winter, is Sacagawea, but this line will not identify her. The other interpreter is not named either. Clark’s “Servent” is York, sent with stewed fruit and tea “at dift Tims,” and that kindness is what Clark says caused the misunderstanding between the two men “on account of their Squars.” It is a captain’s domestic note: who was sick, who carried the bowl, what the quarrel was about. Whitehouse’s bowl went to a buffalo head; Clark’s bowl went to a sick woman in the interpreters’ quarters.
Ordway’s fragment
Ordway’s published text for the day is four words:
considerable corn.
That is the whole entry in this corpus. It points at Mandan supply — the corn the villages traded and gave through the winter — and at nothing else. No badger, no visitors from the North West Company, no buffalo head, no stewed fruit, no names. If a fuller Ordway page once existed, it is not here.
Three facts that do not touch
No two of the three overlap on an incident. Whitehouse alone has the village meal and the buffalo head. Clark alone has the cold fair day, Indians at the fort, the interpreters’ quarrel, and York’s fruit and tea. Ordway alone has corn. By late January the fort routine was familiar enough that each man could write what sat in front of him instead of copying a shared log. The day in this corpus is that composite, and only that: a rite in the villages, a quarrel in the fort, and a note that there was corn.
