The buffalo hunt of December 8, 1804, generated three distinct journal accounts that, when read side by side, illuminate how rank, literacy, and proximity to events shaped the expedition’s documentary record. Clark led the party personally; Ordway rode with him; Gass apparently remained at Fort Mandan and recorded the day secondhand.
Temperature, Terrain, and Register
Clark opens with precise instrumentation, noting the thermometer at
12 d. below 0 which is 42 d. below the freesing point
— a calculation typical of his quantitative habit. Ordway, lacking the thermometer reading, reaches instead for comparative experience, describing the morning as colder
than I ever new it to be in the States
and later capturing an atmospheric detail neither officer records:
the air thick with Ice all this day, like a fog.
Clark, for his part, notes a meteorological curiosity Ordway misses —
2 reflectings Suns to day
— almost certainly sun dogs, the parhelia common in extreme cold.
Gass, whose entry is the briefest of the three, compresses the day into a tally: nine buffalo and a deer killed, multiple men frostbitten, two left to guard the meat. His count of nine differs from Ordway’s six and Clark’s eight-buffalo-and-one-deer accounting, suggesting Gass either heard the figure imprecisely on the hunters’ return or aggregated kills from separate parties. Since Gass was writing his journal up later from notes — and his published 1807 version was heavily edited — such discrepancies are characteristic.
What Each Narrator Sees
Ordway, riding beside Clark, supplies the most cinematic account. He describes spotting
the praries Black at a distance
with buffalo, watching Mandan hunters on horseback running the herds, and noting how
the men all Scattered So that we missed oppertuntities of Surrounding the gangs of Buffalow.
This tactical observation — that the party’s discipline broke down — is absent from Clark’s own entry, which understandably omits any criticism of the hunt’s coordination. Clark instead emphasizes his personal exertion, admitting he feels
a little fatigued haveing run after the Buffalow all day in Snow many Places 10 inches Deep.
The Indigenous role in the hunt receives different treatment from each man. Clark notes simply that
Indians joined us on horseback, shot with arrows rode along side of buffaloe
and adds at the close that
The Indians kill great numbers of Buffalow to day.
Ordway calls them
Savvages
— a register Clark avoids in this entry — and watches them as a separate spectacle rather than as collaborators. Gass omits the Mandan presence entirely, suggesting that for narrators not on the prairie, the hunt registered only as a kill count and a casualty list.
Cold Casualties and Command Responsibility
All three men note frostbite, but with telling differences in specificity. Gass reports impersonally that
One man got his hand frozen, another his foot; and some more got a little touched.
Ordway mentions only that Clark
gave a drink of Taffee
— a ration of diluted rum — to the men who accompanied him, a detail of small-c command care that Clark himself does not record. Clark, however, names injuries Ordway and Gass do not: his servant York’s feet were frosted,
& his P-s a little
— the abbreviation almost certainly euphemizing a more intimate frostbite. Clark also documents that
two men hurt their hips verry much in Slipping down
on the icy ground, an injury report missing from the other journals.
The pattern across the three entries is consistent with what scholars have long observed: Clark records command-level data — temperatures, distances, individual injuries, his own fatigue — while Ordway, the orderly sergeant riding with him, captures the texture of the hunt and small acts of officer-to-enlisted-man relations. Gass, writing from inside the fort, provides the abstracted summary a reader of the published expedition narrative would later receive. Together the three entries demonstrate that no single journal, even Clark’s, captures the full December 8 record; the hunt exists most completely in their overlap.
