The Christmas celebration of 1804 at Fort Mandan offers an unusually clean case study in cross-narrator comparison. Four members of the Corps of Discovery — Captain William Clark, Sergeant Patrick Gass, Sergeant John Ordway, and Private Joseph Whitehouse — all set down accounts of the same day in the same garrison. The party fired salutes, raised the American flag for the first time over the new fort, drank rationed spirits, and danced without female company save for the interpreter’s three Indian wives. Yet the four entries differ dramatically in what they preserve and how they preserve it.
The Captain’s Brevity and the Sergeants’ Choreography
Clark’s own entry is the shortest of the four. He notes being awakened before day by “a discharge of 3 platoons from the Party and the french,” issues “a little Taffia,” permits three cannon at the flag-raising, and observes that “the frolick ended” at 9 P.M. His prose is administrative and compressed — a commander’s log rather than a participant’s memoir.
I was awakened before Day by a discharge of 3 platoons from the Party and the french, the men merrily Disposed, I give them all a little Taffia and permited 3 Cannon fired, at raising Our flag
By contrast, Gass and Whitehouse provide nearly identical hour-by-hour choreographies of the day. Both describe the swivel discharge followed by small arms, Clark’s presentation of a glass of brandy to each man, the raising of the flag celebrated with “another glass,” the clearing of a room for dancing, the 10 o’clock brandy, the gun fired at 1 P.M. as a signal for dinner, the half-past-two signal gun, and the dancing continued “in a jovial manner till 8 at night.” The verbal parallels are too close to be coincidental:
at lo oC we had another Glass of brandy, at one a gun was fired as a Signal for diner, half past two another gun was fired to assemble at the dance, and So we kept it up in a jovel manner untill eight oC. at night (Whitehouse)
Gass’s published version reads almost as a polished edition of Whitehouse’s manuscript phrasing — or both sergeants and the private may have drawn on a shared oral reconstruction of the schedule. Either way, the convergence demonstrates that the enlisted journals were not produced in isolation. Whitehouse, the lowest-ranking of the four diarists, follows the same template Gass uses, including the careful note that the three squaws “took no part with us only to look on.”
Ordway’s Compression and the Question of the “Great Medician Day”
Ordway’s entry compresses the same events but contributes a phrase neither Gass nor Whitehouse offers: he explains that the natives were asked to stay away because “it was a Great medician day with us.” Where Gass writes flatly that “the commanding officers having requested they should not” come to the garrison, Ordway translates the request into the diplomatic idiom of the surrounding Mandan and Hidatsa villages — framing Christmas as an American ceremony comparable to a Native sacred observance. This is the kind of cross-cultural register that distinguishes Ordway’s prose throughout the winter.
Ordway also uses the French-derived “Taffee” (rum), as does Clark with his spelling “Taffia,” while Gass and Whitehouse Anglicize the ration as “brandy” and “good old whiskey.” The lexical split is suggestive: the captain and the orderly sergeant, both responsible for issuing the spirits, name them by the trade term that appeared on inventories, while the two journal-keepers writing for posterity reach for more familiar English words.
What Each Narrator Preserves Alone
Only Gass carries the narrative forward into the New Year, supplying the detail that on 1 January 1805 a portion of the party went up to the Mandan village at the natives’ request “to begin the dance.” Only Whitehouse preserves the slightly archaic phrasing “the comp[any] of the female Seek” for the absence of women at the frolic. Only Ordway labels the day “a merry cristmas” in those words. And only Clark records that the French engagés joined the dawn salute alongside the American party — a small but telling reminder that Fort Mandan’s garrison was a mixed company, not a uniformly American one.
Read together, the four entries show how a single day could be remembered as a commander’s terse log, a sergeant’s structured timetable, an enlisted man’s near-copy of that timetable, and an orderly sergeant’s brief but ethnographically alert summary. The Christmas frolic of 1804 is the same event in each — but the documentary record it produced is layered, collaborative, and unmistakably stratified by rank.
