The expedition’s halt at the upper Arikara villages on October 11, 1804, produced four overlapping but tonally distinct journal entries. Read together, the accounts of William Clark, Patrick Gass, John Ordway, and Joseph Whitehouse reveal how rank, literary ambition, and personal attentiveness shaped what each man chose to record. The shared scaffolding — a morning council, a midday gift of corn and beans, a request that the captains broker peace with the Mandans, and an afternoon move upriver — is unmistakable. Yet the texture of the day differs sharply from pen to pen.
The Council and Its Echoes
Clark, as co-commander, devotes the bulk of his entry to formal diplomacy. He renders the Grand Chief Ka kaw issassa’s speech in near-verbatim form:
If you want the road open no one Can provent it it will always be open for you. Can you think any one Dare put their hands on your rope of your boat. No! not one dar
Clark’s double draft of the day — one terser, one expanded — shows him reworking the council into the kind of record a captain would want preserved. He notes the chief’s anxiety about lacking beaver-working skill and his pledge to make buffalo robes instead, details the enlisted men do not mention.
Gass and Ordway, by contrast, compress the speech into reported summary. Gass writes that the chief "wished our commanding officers would speak a good word for them to the Mandans; for they wanted to be at peace with them." Ordway gives almost the identical formula: the chief "desired that we Would Speak a good word for them to the Mandan nation for they wished to make pease with them." The verbal parallel suggests either a shared source — perhaps an oral debrief among the men — or that this single sentence was the takeaway most enlisted journalists settled on. Whitehouse compresses still further, reducing the entire council to one line:
about 12 oClock the natives came to our camp & Gave us Some corn beans & squashes & wished our officers to Speak a good word for them at the Mandans, for they Said they wished to make peace.
Whitehouse’s brevity here is characteristic. Where Clark hears speeches, Whitehouse hears a transaction.
Details Only One Narrator Catches
Each journalist preserves something the others omit. Ordway alone records two unflattering incidents: a chief’s loss of his American gifts when his bullboat overturned crossing the river — "the Skin cannoe got over Set [and] turned everry thing out of it he Grieved himself considerable about his loss" — and the theft of the party’s best axe while the cooks were ashore. Ordway also notes the captains’ celestial observation and the Indians’ astonishment at the instrument, a scene neither Clark nor Gass mentions. The presentation of a steel mill, prized by the Arikara, likewise survives only in Ordway’s pages.
Gass, the carpenter-sergeant, supplies the most sustained ethnographic appraisal. His judgment is unusually warm:
These are the best looking Indians I have ever seen… They are the most cleanly Indians I have ever seen on the voyage; as well as the most friendly and industrious.
This stands in pointed contrast to Clark, who in both drafts describes the same hosts as "both pore & dirtey" even while acknowledging "everry civility" from them. The divergence is one of the more striking register differences in the day’s record: an officer’s fastidious distaste set against a sergeant’s admiration. Gass also catches a logistical detail Clark omits — that the party anchored some fifty yards from shore and dispatched a pirogue across the river for firewood, since "there is no wood near these 2 villages," as Ordway corroborates.
The Mouse-Stolen Bean
One detail unites Clark with himself across his two drafts but appears nowhere else: the curious account of a bean gathered not from gardens but from rodent caches. "A large well flavoured Been which they rob the Mice of in the Plains and is verry nurishing," he writes in the first version, expanding in the second to "a large Been, which they rob the mice of the Prarie which is rich & verry nurrishing." That Gass, Ordway, and Whitehouse all sat down to similar meals yet none recorded this culinary curiosity suggests Clark either inquired more closely about ingredients or found the practice memorable enough to seek out a second telling. It is a useful reminder that even on a day when four men ate from the same bowls, the Arikara villages produced four substantially different journals.
