On 23 October 1804, the Corps of Discovery moved upriver through bottoms thick with cottonwood, passing an abandoned Indian encampment that had become a minor cause célèbre within the expedition: it was the site where two French trappers had recently been robbed. Three narrators — William Clark, John Ordway, and Patrick Gass — recorded the day, and their entries align on the central facts while diverging in revealing ways on weather, count, and incidental detail.
The Robbed Frenchmen and the Empty Camp
All three narrators flag the abandoned camp as the day’s principal landmark, but their framing differs. Clark, in his field notes, simply records:
passed 5 Lodges fortified the place the two french men were robed Those are the hunting Camps of the mandans, who has latterly left them.
His expanded entry adds narrative motive, noting that the trappers themselves were traveling with the expedition:
we Suppose those were the Indians who robed the 2 french Trappers a fiew days ago those 2 men are now with us going up with a view to get their property from the Indians thro us.
Clark thus situates the camp within an ongoing diplomatic errand — the captains were expected to mediate the recovery of stolen property as they approached the Mandan villages. Ordway, by contrast, fixes the moment by clock time (“about 9. o. C. we passed the Indian Camp”) and offers an architectural observation Clark omits: that the three lodges still standing were “built in the Same manner as those in their villages,” a comparative note that anticipates the expedition’s coming winter at Fort Mandan. Gass, more spare, simply records that the party “passed the place where the Frenchmen had been robbed but no Indians could be seen.”
The three accounts do not even agree on the count of lodges. Clark sees five; Ordway sees three still standing; Gass gives no number. The discrepancy is characteristic — Clark tends to tally fortifications and structures with surveyor’s precision, while Ordway counts what remains intact, and Gass abstracts to the essential fact.
Weather, Berries, and the Sergeants’ Divergent Eyes
The day’s weather provides another instance of cross-narrator variation. Clark records only “Some Snow” and “a cloudy morning.” Gass is more circumstantial:
morning was cloudy. At 8 it began to snow, and continued snowing to 11, when it ceased.
Ordway, unusually, says nothing of the snow at all — a silence worth noting given that Ordway’s journal is generally the most weather-attentive of the sergeants’ records. The omission suggests his attention on the 23rd was directed elsewhere, principally toward the camp at day’s end.
That camp produced the entry’s most distinctive detail. Both Ordway and Gass record finding a quantity of a small red berry growing in the timbered bottom. Gass calls them “rabbit berries” plainly. Ordway elaborates with the kind of sensory and ethnobotanical specificity that distinguishes his journal:
the Buff, or Rabit Ranges of which we eat freely off. they are a Small red berry, Sower & Good to the taste, we have Seen them pleanty in this Country.
The berries — almost certainly buffaloberry (Shepherdia argentea) — receive no mention in Clark’s terse entry. The pattern is typical: Clark logs geography and diplomacy, Gass condenses, and Ordway preserves the foodways and small comforts of the men. Ordway’s “Sower & Good to the taste” is the kind of register that has made his journal an essential supplement to the captains’ more official record.
Registers and Reliance
Comparing the three entries reveals little evidence of direct copying on this date — a contrast with stretches earlier in the voyage where Gass and Ordway’s accounts run noticeably parallel. Here each narrator pursues his own emphasis: Clark the strategic and structural (lodge counts, the trappers’ suit for redress), Gass the meteorological framework and a clean summary of the day’s hunt (“Three hunters were out to day, but killed nothing”), and Ordway the textures of camp life. Read together, the three entries reconstruct a fuller day than any one of them records alone — a snowy morning’s passage by an abandoned, fortified hunting camp, and an evening in a cottonwood bottom where the men ate sour red berries by the riverbank, only days from the Mandan towns where they would winter.
