The journal entries for October 20, 1804, offer an unusually rich opportunity for cross-narrator comparison. Four members of the Corps of Discovery — Meriwether Lewis, William Clark, John Ordway, and Patrick Gass — recorded the day’s progress along the Missouri above the abandoned Mandan villages near present-day Emmons County, North Dakota. The entries share a common spine of events: a creek crossing, an island, an old earth-lodge village site, a coal-bearing bluff for the night’s camp, and a hunters’ return tally that included a wounded white bear. Yet each narrator filters those events through a distinct register, and the divergences reveal as much about the journalists as about the day itself.
The Sergeants’ Shared Spine
Ordway and Gass produce entries so structurally parallel that the relationship between them — long debated by editors — is conspicuous here. Both move through the same sequence of landmarks in the same order, using nearly identical phrasing for the geography. Ordway writes that the party
passed a creek on N. S. 20 yds wide, passed Bottoms covered with Timber on Boath Sides of the River. passd a creek on S.S. opposite the lowei point of an Island.
Gass renders the same sequence as a creek "about 20 yards wide; bottom covered with timber on both sides, and a small river on the south side opposite the lower point of an island." The two sergeants diverge meaningfully on only one numerical detail: Ordway counts 12 Deer one Goat & a woolf in the hunters’ bag, while Gass tallies 14 deer, a goat and a wolf. Both agree that "one of them wounded a large white bear" (Gass) or "a White Bare" (Ordway) — but neither sergeant names the hunter. For them, the encounter is a line item in the day’s accounting.
Lewis Names the Man; Clark Reads the Land
Lewis’s entry for the day is unusual in this stretch of the journals: it is brief, anecdotal, and entirely focused on a single hunter. He alone identifies the man who wounded the bear:
Peter Crusat this day shot at a white bear he wounded him, but being alarmed at the formidable appearance of the bear he left his tomahalk and gun; but shortly after returned and found that the bear had taken the oposite rout.
Lewis then adds a second Cruzatte vignette — a wounded buffalo cow chasing the hunter into a ravine — that the other three journalists omit entirely. Where Ordway and Gass log a wounded bear as inventory, Lewis treats it as character study, preserving the abandoned tomahawk and the hunter’s prudent retreat. The episode also marks one of the expedition’s earliest recorded encounters with the grizzly, an animal that would loom larger in Lewis’s later prose.
Clark, meanwhile, is doing something neither sergeant attempts: he is reading the landscape against a prior document. Twice in his entry he refers to "those remarkable places pointed out by Evins" — the trader John Evans, whose 1796–97 map the captains carried upriver. Clark walks the south shore on foot, identifies an old Mandan village on a hillside, and records oral testimony from the Arikara chief traveling with them:
Too ne tels me that nation lived in a number villages on each Side of the river and the Troubleson Seauex caused them to move about 40 miles higher up where they remained a fiew years & moved to the place they now live
This ethnographic and historical layer — Mandan displacement by the Sioux, confirmed by an Arikara informant and cross-checked against Evans — appears in no other journal for the day. Ordway notes only the bare fact of "the Is^t old village of the Mandens." Gass omits the village altogether.
The Wolves and the Bear Tracks
Clark also contributes the day’s most striking natural-history observation, one absent from the other three narrators. Having seen tracks "3 times as large as a mans track," he reflects on the trophic relationship between wolves and bison:
I observe near all large gangues of buffalow wolves and when the buffalow move those Anamals follow and feed on those that are killed by accident or those that are too pore or fat to Keep up with the gangue.
The pattern across the four entries is consistent with what scholars have long noted about this stage of the expedition: the sergeants produce a shared logistical record, often near-duplicates of each other; Lewis writes intermittently and gravitates toward incident and personality; Clark carries the heaviest descriptive load, integrating geography, ethnography, and ecology. October 20 compresses all three tendencies into a single day’s worth of pages, with a wounded white bear as the shared event that each narrator chose to handle differently.
