The entries for 27 December 1804 at Fort Mandan offer an unusually clear demonstration of how the expedition’s three journal-keepers on this date — William Clark, John Ordway, and Patrick Gass — divided the labor of remembering. Each narrator recorded the same day, but the resulting texts barely overlap. Read side by side, they reveal not contradiction but complementary registers: the commander’s terse log, the sergeant’s work-roster shorthand, and the carpenter-sergeant’s expanded narrative reconstruction.
Clark’s Compressed Diplomatic Log
Clark’s entry is the briefest of the three, fewer than thirty words of substance. He notes the weather (“a little fine Snow weather something Colder than yesterday”), the wind direction (“hard from the N W”), and a single social observation:
Several Indians here to Day, much Surprised at the Bellos & method of makeing Sundery articles of Iron
For Clark, the day’s significance lies in Mandan visitors and their reaction to the blacksmith’s forge — a detail with diplomatic and trade implications. The bellows and the iron work were among the expedition’s most powerful instruments of cross-cultural exchange, and Clark, ever attentive to relations with neighboring nations, registers the encounter without elaboration. He says nothing of hunting, nothing of construction, nothing of frozen feet.
Ordway’s Single-Line Work Report
Ordway’s entry is even shorter. He records only the day’s labor assignments:
laying a flower [floor] in the Intrepeters room & finishing the blacksmiths Shop &C.
The phonetic spelling “flower” for “floor” is characteristic of Ordway’s orthography. What is striking is that Ordway’s blacksmith shop is the very structure housing the bellows that astonished Clark’s Mandan visitors — yet Ordway does not mention the visitors, and Clark does not mention that the shop was only just being completed. The two sergeants and the captain were standing within yards of one another, watching the same building, and recording entirely different facts about it. Ordway tracks completion of infrastructure; Clark tracks its diplomatic effect.
Gass’s Expansive Narrative
Gass, by contrast, produces a substantial paragraph that ranges far beyond the fort’s palisade. He opens with weather and hunting, cataloguing the day’s kill (“a small buffaloe, 3 elk, 4 deer and two or three wolves”) and singling out “a beautiful white hare” — likely a white-tailed jackrabbit in winter pelage — that none of the other narrators mention. He then relates an anecdote about three hunters reduced to eating wolf meat:
they were obliged to eat; and said they relished it pretty well, but found it rather tough.
The dry humor and reported speech are typical of Gass’s voice as it appears in the published 1807 edition, which was edited by David McKeehan from Gass’s original notes. The published Gass is consistently more anecdotal and morally shaped than the field journals of Clark or Ordway, and the second half of this entry — concerning a Mandan hunter who collapsed on the prairie — is a case in point:
one of them gave out on his return in the evening; and was left in the plain or prairie covered with a buffaloe robe. After some time he began to recover and removed to the woods, where he broke a number of branches to lie on, and to keep his body off the snow. In the morning he came to the fort, with his feet badly frozen, and the officers undertook his cure.
This is a fully developed vignette with a beginning, middle, and resolution. Neither Clark nor Ordway records the incident at all, although the captains were the “officers” who undertook the cure. The episode would become significant in later weeks, when frostbite cases at Fort Mandan required amputations performed by Lewis. Gass’s December entry thus quietly anticipates a thread the other narrators will only pick up later.
Patterns Across the Three Hands
The 27 December entries illustrate a recurring division of attention at Fort Mandan. Clark logs weather, wind, and Indian relations in compressed military prose. Ordway functions almost as a quartermaster, listing tasks and structures. Gass — or Gass-as-edited-by-McKeehan — supplies the narrative texture, the named animals, the remembered dialogue, and the human-interest episodes that the other two omit. Where the three intersect, as in the implied presence of the blacksmith shop, the convergence is oblique rather than corroborative. Researchers reconstructing daily life at the fort must read all three to recover what any one of them, alone, would have lost.
