The entries for November 12, 1804 capture the Lewis and Clark expedition in the early weeks of its Mandan winter, with the Missouri beginning to ice over and the captains negotiating relationships with the surrounding villages. Three narrators — Sergeant Patrick Gass, Sergeant John Ordway, and Captain William Clark — describe the same day, but their accounts diverge sharply in scope and register, revealing how rank, responsibility, and authorial ambition shaped what each man chose to record.
A Chief’s Gift, Recorded Three Ways
The central event of the day was the arrival of Sheheke (“Big White”), principal chief of the lower Mandan village, bearing roughly one hundred pounds of buffalo meat. Clark gives the fullest account, noting that the chief
packd about 100 W. of fine meet on his Squar for us, we made Some Small presents to the Squar, & Child gave a Small ax which She was much pleased
Ordway records the same delivery in more utilitarian terms, framing the meat as a logistical relief:
the chief of the lower village of the Mandens brought us Some buffalow meat which we were in want [of] as our hunters has not arived yet.
Gass, by contrast, omits the visit entirely. His entry concentrates on the landscape passed and on his own hunting expedition with Captain Clark, which kept him out until after dark. The omission is telling: Gass writes as a working sergeant focused on terrain, distance, and labor, while Ordway — also a sergeant — registers the diplomatic event but reduces it to a question of provisions. Only Clark, as captain, attends to the social texture of the exchange, the gendered dynamics of gift-giving (the meat carried by the chief’s wife), and the small ax presented to her in return.
Weather, Labor, and the Coming Winter
All three men register the cold, but again with differing emphasis. Clark calls it “a verry Cold night,” notes the wind as “Changeable verry cold,” and observes ice forming on the river edges and swans passing south — a captain’s environmental survey. Ordway opens with the matter-of-fact “frost, froze Some last night, we continued our buildings as usal,” a sergeant’s log of work in progress at the rising Fort Mandan. He adds that the party “unloaded the pearogue in order to fetch Stone,” a construction detail neither captain nor fellow sergeant records. Gass, traveling with the hunting party, says nothing of the weather at all, reporting instead that “the boat had much difficulty in passing on account of the sand bars and strong current, and did not make today more than four miles.” The discrepancy suggests Gass’s entry may conflate or carry over material from earlier days of upriver travel, since by November 12 the keelboat was already moored near the wintering site.
Clark Alone Preserves the Mandan Past
The most striking divergence is ethnographic. Clark devotes the bulk of his entry to a long summary, evidently drawn from the expedition’s interpreter, of Mandan oral history: an origin from “a Small lake where they had Gardins,” a former position lower on the Missouri, and the catastrophe that reshaped the northern plains.
the Smallpox destroyed the greater part of the nation and reduced them to one large Village and Some Small ones, all nations before this maladey was affrd. of them after they were reduced the Sioux and other Indians waged war, and killed a great maney, and they moved up the Missourie
Clark proceeds to enumerate the fighting strength of the Mandan (about 350 men), the Hidatsa subgroups he calls Winatarees (80) and Big Bellies (600–650), and the Crow or “Ravin Indians” (400 lodges, 1200 men), along with their alliances and ongoing wars with the Sioux and Snake Indians. He observes that “the mandans and Seauex have the Same word for water” and that the Hidatsa and Crow “Speake nearly the Same language and the presumption is they were origionally the Same nation” — a comparative-linguistic inference unusual in the captains’ field notes.
Neither Ordway nor Gass touches any of this material. The pattern is consistent with what scholars have long observed about the journals’ division of labor: the enlisted men recorded weather, work, and movement, while the captains — particularly Clark — gathered the intelligence on Indigenous nations that Jefferson had explicitly commissioned. The November 12 entries thus form a small case study in how the expedition’s documentary record was stratified by rank, with the day’s most consequential information surviving in only one of three voices.
