The journal entries of January 7, 1805, offer a revealing case study in how four men sharing the same winter quarters at Fort Mandan produced four distinctly different records of the same day. Clark, Ordway, Whitehouse, and Gass each wrote according to their roles, interests, and registers — and the gaps between their accounts illuminate as much as their overlaps.
A Shared Event, Four Registers
Three narrators converge on a single shared incident: the return of a hunting party. Ordway, characteristically terse, records that the men:
returned who had been down the River a hunting, had killed one wolf which they eat as they had nothing else with them, they killed also 2 Deer and one buffalo, but had Suffered considerable with the cold.
Clark, writing the same event, gives different numbers — “they kill’d 4 Deer & 2 wolves, Saw Buffalow a long ways off” — and omits Ordway’s vivid detail that the hunters were reduced to eating wolf meat. The discrepancy in tallies (one buffalo and two deer in Ordway versus four deer and two wolves in Clark) is typical of the expedition’s record: sergeants and captains often counted independently, and neither was necessarily copying the other. Ordway’s attention to the men’s suffering and their improvised meal reflects his perspective as a non-commissioned officer close to the ranks, while Clark’s brief tally subordinates the hunt to the day’s larger business.
That larger business, for Clark, was cartography. He devotes the bulk of his entry to a visit from the Big White Chief of the Lower Mandan Village, who:
gave me a Scetch of the Countrey as far as the high mountains, & on the South Side of the River Rejone, he Says that the river rejone recves 6 Small rivers on the S. Side, & that the Countrey is verry hilley and the greater part Covered with timber, Great numbers of beaver &c.
Clark closes by noting his ongoing effort to “Draw a connected plote from the information of Traders, Indians & my own observation,” and offers his estimate that “the Great falls is about 800 miles nearly west.” None of the other three narrators mentions the Big White Chief’s visit or the geographical conference — a striking omission, given that this consultation is one of the most consequential intelligence-gathering moments of the winter. The captains evidently kept such diplomatic and cartographic work to themselves.
Whitehouse’s Ethnographic Eye
Whitehouse, alone among the four, turns his attention to Mandan domestic life. While Clark records temperatures (“22 d below 0”) and Ordway records suffering in the cold, Whitehouse documents how the Mandans themselves managed the season:
the natives keep their horses in their lodges with themselves every cold night dureing the winter Season & feed them on nothing but the branches of cotton wood which they cut off the Bark, which is Sweet & good, they live on it & look tollarably well.
This is the kind of close ethnographic observation that recurs throughout Whitehouse’s journal and that often goes unremarked by the captains. He also describes a social visit to the second Mandan village, where the men “danced and amused our Selves the greater part of the [day] which pleased the natives.” Neither the dance nor the cottonwood-fed horses appears in Clark’s, Ordway’s, or Gass’s entries for the date — a reminder that Whitehouse frequently preserved cultural details the official record passed over.
The Gass Anomaly
Gass’s entry under this date is anomalous: it does not describe January 7, 1805, at all. Instead, the surviving text recounts the departure from Fort Mandan — “About 5 o’clock In the afternoon we left fort Mandans in good spirits. Thirty one men and a woman went up the river” — an event that occurred on April 7, 1805. The passage continues into April 8, describing a canoe taking water and Sacagawea (“a squaw of the Snake nation of Indians”) as interpreter. This is almost certainly an artifact of Gass’s published 1807 journal, which was reorganized and edited by David McKeehan from Gass’s original field notes; the OCR text here appears to have been misindexed to the January date.
The result is instructive. Where Ordway, Whitehouse, and Clark provide three independent witnesses to a single winter day — each shaped by rank, role, and curiosity — the Gass material reminds readers that the published expedition journals are themselves layered documents, and that cross-narrator analysis must account not only for what each man saw but for how his record reached print.
