December 24, 1804 found the Corps of Discovery completing the picketing of their winter quarters among the Mandan villages on the upper Missouri. Three of the expedition’s journal-keepers — Sergeant Patrick Gass, Sergeant John Ordway, and Captain William Clark — each set down a record of the day. Although all three converge on a single fact (the fortification was finished), their entries read almost like dispatches from three different posts. The contrasts illuminate not only the rhythms of garrison life on the eve of the expedition’s first Christmas in the interior, but also the distinct sensibilities each man brought to his journal.
One Day, Three Foregrounds
Gass, who would later publish the first printed account of the expedition, foregrounds quartermaster’s business. His entry pivots almost immediately from weather to rations:
cleared up, and the weather became pleasant. This evening we finished our fortification. Flour, dried apples, pepper and other articles were distributed in the different messes to enable them to celebrate Christmas in a proper and social manner.
The phrase “in a proper and social manner” reveals Gass’s instinct for orderly, communal observance. He alone names the holiday provisions — flour, dried apples, pepper — and notes their distribution by mess. For Gass, Christmas Eve is a logistical event: the captains have made arrangements, and the men have been issued the materials of celebration.
Ordway, by contrast, writes with the clipped efficiency of a duty-roster:
Setting pickets & arected a blacksmiths Shop, the afternoon pleasant, the Savages came as usal we fired our Swivels as to-morrow is cristmas day &.C.
Where Gass sees provisions, Ordway sees labor and ordnance. He is the only narrator to mention the erection of the blacksmith’s shop and the only one to record the firing of the swivel guns — a martial salute that doubled as a demonstration of the expedition’s firepower for the assembled visitors. The casual “as usal” indicates how routine Mandan visitation had already become.
Clark and the Diplomacy of Sheepskin
Clark’s entry opens onto the same scene Ordway compresses into four words — “the Savages came as usal” — but Clark stretches it into a paragraph of careful ethnographic observation:
Several Chiefs and members of men womin and Children at the fort to day, Some for trade, the most as lookers on, we gave a fellet of Sheep Skin (which we brought for Spunging) to 3 Chiefs one to each of 2 inches wide, which they lay great value (priseing those felets equal to a fine horse)
Clark distinguishes traders from “lookers on,” a social gradation Ordway flattens. He records a small but telling diplomatic transaction: two-inch strips of sheepskin originally intended as gun-cleaning material (“Spunging”) presented as gifts to three chiefs, who valued them on the order of a fine horse. The detail captures one of the expedition’s recurring discoveries — that the value of trade goods was set by the receivers, not the senders — and it appears in no other narrator’s entry for the day.
Convergence and Register
All three men note the pleasant weather, and all three confirm the completion of the picketing — Gass’s “we finished our fortification,” Ordway’s “Setting pickets,” and Clark’s “we finished the pickingen around our works.” The shared observation is unsurprising: the closing-in of the fort was the signal event of the day, and all three writers were close enough in the chain of command to know it had been accomplished.
Yet the registers differ markedly. Gass, writing for an eventual reading public, frames the day around sociability and propriety. Ordway, the orderly sergeant, writes in the telegraphic style of a man accustomed to recording duties performed. Clark, the senior officer present, attends to relations with the Mandan — to who came, why they came, and what passed between them. Where Ordway flattens the visitors into a single category and Gass omits them entirely, Clark individuates and counts.
There is no evidence on this date of one journalist copying another; the three accounts are independent enough in detail and phrasing to suggest each man wrote from his own observation. Read together, they offer a fuller Christmas Eve than any one provides alone: a fort newly closed against the plains winter, a blacksmith’s shop rising inside the walls, swivel guns saluting the coming holiday, Mandan visitors trading and watching, and the messes drawing flour and dried apples for the morrow.
