The journals of November 22, 1804 offer an unusually sharp demonstration of how the expedition’s narrators divided their attention. Sergeant John Ordway and Captain William Clark both record the same routine errand — a pirogue dispatched to the second Mandan village for corn — but with strikingly different framing. Patrick Gass, by contrast, is not writing about this day at all in the surviving entry, a reminder that Gass’s published journal sometimes lags or compresses the chronology of the captains’ fuller records.
Ordway and Clark on the Corn Errand
Ordway’s note is brisk and logistical. He records the pirogue’s mission to the second Mandan village and its return:
the pearogue returned towards evening with abt 12 bushels of mixed coullourd corn in ears [word illegible] which the natives took out of the Ground where they burry it in holes in their village.
Ordway is curious about Mandan storage practice — the cached corn pulled from sub-surface pits — and he notes the variegated color of the ears. He also closes out a small construction detail: the men have “completed building the backs of our chimneys,” a sentence that locates the day within the slow finish-work of Fort Mandan.
Clark records the same dispatch but with very different numbers and command-level detail. Where Ordway gives “abt 12 bushels,” Clark writes:
Dispatched a perogue and 5 Men under the Derection of Sergeant Pryor to the 2nd Village for 100 bushels of Corn in ears which Mr. Jessomme, let us have did not get more than 80 bushels
The discrepancy between Ordway’s twelve and Clark’s eighty is striking and probably reflects what each man saw: Ordway may be recording only what was unloaded in his presence, or a separate, smaller transaction, while Clark records the negotiated total mediated by the interpreter René Jusseaume. Clark also names the agent (Pryor), the broker (Jusseaume), and the target figure — the kind of administrative specificity that distinguishes the captain’s journal from the sergeant’s.
Clark Alone on the Domestic Dispute
The day’s most consequential event appears only in Clark’s journal. Around ten o’clock the sentinel alerted him that an Indian man was about to kill his wife at the interpreter’s fire below the works. Clark intervened personally:
I went down and Spoke to the fellow about the rash act which he was like to commit and forbid any act of the kind near the fort
Clark then reconstructs the back-story: a quarrel eight days earlier had driven the woman to take refuge with the interpreters’ wives; she had returned to the village, then come back to the interpreter’s fire “appearently much beat, & Stabed in 3 places.” Neither Ordway nor Gass mentions the episode, although Ordway is named in Clark’s account — Clark directs “Serjeant Odway to give the man Some articles” as part of the resolution. That Ordway omits an incident in which he played a direct role is characteristic: his journal tends toward task-lists and weather, not the social and disciplinary frictions that Clark felt obliged to document.
Clark’s handling of the dispute is also notable for what it reveals about the captains’ standing orders. Confronted with the husband’s accusation that “one of our Serjeants Slept with his wife,” Clark issues a categorical prohibition:
no man of the party Should touch his Squar, or the wife of any Indian, nor did I believe they touch a woman if they knew her to be the wife of another man
The arrival of the Mandan grand chief — almost certainly Black Cat, whom Clark elsewhere praises for his “integrety, firmness, intiligence” — converts the incident from a private quarrel into a diplomatic occasion. The chief lectures the husband, the couple departs together, and the chief remains at the fort for the rest of the day exchanging “many Indian anickdotes.”
Gass Out of Sequence
The Gass entry transcribed under this date does not concern November 22, 1804 at all. It describes passing Cedar Island and the trader Régis Loisel’s picketed fort — a structure 65 or 70 feet square with sentry boxes and a four-room interior house — and notes the dog poles found at an abandoned Indian camp. This material belongs to the expedition’s late-September ascent of the Missouri, well below the Mandan villages. Its appearance here is an artifact of Gass’s published journal, which David McKeehan edited from Gass’s field notes after the expedition; the printed text sometimes attaches descriptive passages to dates other than those of original observation. For a researcher comparing narrators, the lesson is procedural: Gass’s dates require independent verification, while Ordway and Clark, writing in real time, can be cross-checked against one another for the same day’s events.
