The entries for December 17, 1804 offer an unusually clean case study in how the Fort Mandan journalists handled a quiet garrison day. All four men — Captain William Clark, Sergeants John Ordway and Patrick Gass, and Private Joseph Whitehouse — record essentially the same two pieces of news: a sled prepared for a departing North West Company trader, and word from the Mandan villages that buffalo had returned to the river. But the four accounts diverge in temperature readings, in narrative emphasis, and in the degree to which each writer participated in the day’s small dramas.
Measuring the Cold
Only Clark and Ordway report a thermometer reading, and they do not agree. Ordway notes simply that the instrument
Stood at about 35 fat. it has been Several degrees lower Some days past
Clark, by contrast, gives a far more dramatic figure:
a verry Cold morning the Thrmt. Stood a 43° below 0 … about 8 oClock P M. the thermometer fell to 74° below the freesing pointe
Clark’s two readings — forty-three below zero in the morning and seventy-four below freezing in the evening — describe the same scale in different idioms (74° below freezing equals roughly 42° below zero Fahrenheit). Ordway’s “35” is harder to reconcile and may reflect a reading taken at a different hour or a transcription discrepancy. Gass and Whitehouse, who as enlisted men did not have routine access to the captains’ instruments, omit numbers entirely; Whitehouse settles for “a cold day” and Gass for no weather remark at all beyond the implied chill of garrison life.
The Sled and the Trader
Gass and Whitehouse both single out the preparation of a sled for a North West Company trader — a detail Ordway compresses into silence and Clark omits in favor of his meeting with the trader Hugh Heney. Gass writes that
A sled was fitted up for one of the N.W. traders to return in.
Whitehouse echoes the report almost verbatim but adds a crucial piece of attribution:
Serg^t Gass fixed a horse Sled for one of the N. W. Comp^y traders to go to thier forts with.
Whitehouse’s identification of Gass as the sled-maker is exactly the kind of credit Gass himself, writing in the passive voice (“A sled was fitted up”), declines to claim. The pattern is consistent with what scholars have noted elsewhere in the Gass-Whitehouse relationship: Whitehouse’s entries occasionally preserve specifics about Gass’s carpentry and labor that Gass’s own self-effacing prose obscures. Whether Whitehouse drew on Gass’s notes, observed the work directly, or both, his version supplies the human detail the sergeant’s omits.
Clark, meanwhile, focuses on the intellectual content of the trader’s visit. He describes Heney as
a verry intelligent man from whome we obtained Some Scetches of the Countrey between the Mississippi & Missouri
The captain treats the North West Company contact as a source of geographic and ethnographic intelligence — sketches of country, names and “charecktors” of the Sioux — while the enlisted men treat the same trader simply as a man who needed a sled.
Buffalo at the River
The buffalo report is the one detail all four narrators preserve, but each frames it differently. Ordway is the most circumstantial, naming his informant (“the chiefs Son came from 1st villge of the Mandans”) and noting an unintended consequence:
our men Scared them back by cutting fire wood for the night.
This is a detail unique to Ordway, and it complicates the otherwise hopeful news. Gass and Whitehouse give only the bare announcement that the buffalo had come near the river. Clark, characteristically, records the diplomatic dimension — an invitation:
the Indian Chiefs Sent word that Buffalow was in our neighbourhood, and if we would join them, in the morning they would go and kill them
Where Ordway hears about a herd already disturbed by the woodcutters, Clark hears a proposal for a joint Mandan–American hunt the following morning. Read together, the two accounts suggest a single afternoon’s news that arrived in stages, with each writer recording the version that reached him.
Patterns of Attention
The day’s entries map neatly onto each narrator’s habitual register. Clark records instrument readings, ethnographic sketches, and inter-tribal diplomacy. Ordway, the most reliable sergeant-diarist, supplies named informants and incidental color. Gass writes the briefest, plainest log of garrison work. Whitehouse, often dismissed as a copyist, here proves the most attentive observer of his fellow soldiers — crediting Gass by name where Gass himself will not.
