The journal entries for October 24, 1804, capture the expedition’s first significant meeting with the Mandan, a moment that would shape the next six months of the journey. The Corps was approaching the mouth of the Heart River, near present-day Mandan and Bismarck, North Dakota. Three narrators—Sergeant John Ordway, Sergeant Patrick Gass, and Captain William Clark—each describe the day, but their accounts diverge sharply in scope, register, and detail.
A Diplomatic Encounter on a River-Cut Island
All three journalists note the same central event: the boats halted at an island formed by the river cutting through a narrow point of land, and there the party encountered a Mandan hunting camp. Ordway records the moment in the plain, observational register typical of his journal:
12 o. C. we halted at an Is1 on N. S. where we found a hunting camp of the Mandan Nation of Indians, the chief we had on board Spoke to the chief of this party [and] told them our business & they had Some handsome women with them.
Ordway’s framing is practical and, characteristically, attentive to the women in the camp—a recurring feature of his journal that distinguishes him from his fellow sergeants. He notes the diplomatic exchange but does not name the Mandan chief or dwell on the ceremony.
Clark, by contrast, treats the meeting as a formal diplomatic event worthy of careful documentation. In his field notes he writes that the chiefs "met our Ricarra Chief with great Corduallity, & Smoked together," and in his fair-copy entry he expands the description:
this Cheif met the Chief of the Ricares who accompanied us with great Cordiallity & Sermony Smoked the pipe & Capt. Lewis with the Interpeter went with the Chiefs to his Lodges at 1 mile distant.
Where Ordway sees a brief halt and a conversation, Clark sees the careful staging of intertribal diplomacy—the Arikara chief traveling with the expedition serving as both passenger and instrument of peace-making between historically antagonistic nations. Clark’s reference to the "Sermony" of the pipe and Lewis’s visit to the lodges shows the captain’s awareness that the expedition’s success depended on these gestures being performed correctly.
Gass’s Divergent Record
Gass’s entry for this date presents a textual puzzle. The OCR’d passage rendered above is fragmentary and clearly conflates several days—it references "Monday 30th," a deer brought by hunters, a young beaver taken from a trap, and the loss of horses possibly stolen by Indians. None of this matches what Ordway and Clark describe for October 24. Gass, whose published journal was edited by David McKeehan in 1807, often compresses or rearranges material, and the passage here appears to span several days of camp activity rather than the diplomatic encounter at the island.
The contrast is instructive. Gass (or his editor) prioritizes the everyday rhythm of hunting, trapping, and animal husbandry—the labor of keeping the expedition fed and mounted—over the ceremonial business that occupies Clark. Where Clark records the smoking of the pipe, Gass records a young beaver brought in alive and a buck killed by a returning hunter. Both records are true to the day’s work, but they reflect the different responsibilities and sensibilities of the captain and the sergeant of the carpenters.
Historical Memory in Clark’s Account
Clark alone reaches beyond the immediate encounter into the deeper history of the region. He identifies an abandoned village of "a Band of Me ne tarres Called Mah har ha where they lived 40 year ago," and notes that the party camped "nearly opposit the old Ricara & Manden Village which the Ricarras abandaned in the year 1789." In his entry for the following day he extends this historical layering, recording that the Arikara had occupied an old Mandan village "until 1799 when they abandoned it & flew from the just revenge of the Mandans."
This historical framing is unique to Clark among the three narrators on this date. Neither Ordway nor Gass attempts to situate the day’s events within the longer regional history of village migration, smallpox depopulation, and intertribal warfare that had reshaped the upper Missouri in the preceding decades. Clark’s information almost certainly came from the expedition’s interpreters and from the Arikara chief traveling with the boats—but it is Clark who recognized that this context mattered enough to record.
Read together, the three journals show the expedition operating on parallel tracks: Ordway logging the day’s movements and the human texture of the camp, Gass attending to the practical labor of subsistence, and Clark constructing the diplomatic and historical record that would later anchor the official report.
