The entries of April 3, 1805, capture the Corps of Discovery on the threshold of its journey into unmapped country. The barge that would return downriver to St. Louis—and ultimately to Washington—lay loaded at Fort Mandan, while the pirogues and canoes were being readied for the push upstream. Three narrators record this transitional day, and the contrast among their accounts illustrates how sharply expedition members differed in what they considered worth setting down.
Clark the Curator
William Clark devotes his entry almost entirely to an inventory. His list is the working manifest of the famous shipment to Thomas Jefferson, and it reads like a museum accession ledger. He notes a white frost this morning
and the visit of Mrs. La Roche & McKinsey Clerk to the N W. Compy.
—the latter seeking compensation for a horse lost in expedition service—but the body of the entry is a numbered catalog: skins, skeletons, plant specimens, Mandan pottery, painted buffalo robes, and live animals.
No. 12. The bones & Skeleton of a Small burrowing wolf of the Praries the Skin being lost by accident…. Cage No. 6. Contains a liveing burrowing Squirel of the praries Cage No. 7. Contains 4 liveing magpies Cage No. 9. Containing a liveing hen of the Prarie
Clark’s precision—down to the painted robe representing a battle fought 8 years Since by the Sioux & Ricaras against the mandans, menitarras & Ah wah bar ways
—reflects his role as the expedition’s most reliable record-keeper of material culture. The redundancies in his list (the buffalo robes, fox skins, and ram horns appear in two passes) suggest a working draft consolidated from earlier notes, not a polished entry.
Ordway’s Telegraphic Brevity
Sergeant John Ordway, by contrast, dispatches the day in a single sentence fragment. He records only that the cargo which was to be Sent back to the States in the Big Barge was packed and boxed up ready to go on board.
Ordway’s terseness here is characteristic: where Clark catalogs and Gass philosophizes, Ordway typically logs the operational fact and moves on. For a researcher reconstructing the expedition’s chronology, his entry confirms the practical milestone—the barge load was complete by the third—without elaboration.
Gass and the Question of What Belongs in a Journal
Patrick Gass’s entry is the most striking of the three because he steps outside the day’s events to address future readers directly. After noting that the men had taken all our goods, stores and baggage out, divided and put them aboard our craft,
Gass anticipates that readers will expect commentary on relations with Native women during the winter at Fort Mandan. He demurs—and in demurring, says a great deal:
Though we could furnish a sufficient number of entertaining stories and pleasant anecdotes, we do not think it prudent to swell our Journal with them; as our views are directed to more useful information.
The disclaimer is a feint. Having declined the topic, Gass nonetheless proceeds to characterize Mandan sexual mores in blunt terms, noting that chastity is not very highly esteemed by these people
and that venereal disease—what he calls the severe and loathsome effects of certain French principles
—was widespread. He offers a specific anecdote: for an old tobacco box, one of our men was granted the honour of passing a night with the daughter of the head-chief of the Mandan nation.
This passage almost certainly reflects later editorial shaping. Gass’s manuscript was reworked for publication by David McKeehan in 1807, and the self-aware address to some readers
bears the marks of editorial polish absent from the field journals of Clark and Ordway. The moralizing register—comparing Mandan villages to the large cities of polished nations
—is the voice of a published book, not a sergeant’s notebook.
Three Registers, One Day
Read together, the entries demonstrate the layered character of the expedition’s documentary record. Clark writes for Jefferson and posterity, his catalog functioning as both shipping manifest and scientific report. Ordway writes for himself, recording the operational fact. Gass—or Gass through McKeehan—writes for the reading public, anticipating its curiosities and managing them. None of the three contradicts the others; each illuminates what the others omit. The barge that left Fort Mandan carried not only Clark’s specimens but, in a sense, three different conceptions of what an expedition journal was for.
