The expedition’s final morning among the Arikara villages produced four strikingly uneven records. William Clark fills nearly a full page with ethnographic observation; Patrick Gass writes a competent paragraph; John Ordway captures the trading scene and the music of departure; Joseph Whitehouse manages just two sentences. Read together, the entries demonstrate how a single diplomatic event refracted through differences of rank, audience, and purpose.
The Council and Its Aftermath
All four narrators agree on the day’s basic shape: a morning council with the chiefs of the second and third villages, gifts of corn and beans, departure around noon, and a camp on the north shore. Gass, who accompanied the captains into the villages, supplies the procedural backbone:
At 9 o’clock Captain Lewis, Captain Clarke and myself went to the 2nd Village, and talked with its chief: then to the third Village, about half a mile beyond a small creek, and talked with the chief of that Village: and got some corn and beans from them.
Clark records the same circuit but preserves the political content. The Pocasse chief, Clark writes, declared his intention of visiting the "great father" while expressing "Some Doubts as to his Safty in Passing the Sioux," and asked the captains to broker peace with the Mandan, acknowledging that the Arikara "were the Cause of the war by Killing the 2 Mandan Chiefs." None of the enlisted journalists captures this diplomatic substance. Gass notes only that the chiefs were addressed; Ordway writes that "the officers went to the villages in order to hear what the chiefs had to Say"; Whitehouse omits the council entirely.
Trade, Theft, and the Character of the Hosts
Ordway alone records the bankside trading that occupied the men while the captains conferred. His vignette of small-scale barter — "one of the men Gave an Indian a pin hook & the Indian Gave him in return a pair of Moggisins" — and his ear for the festive departure ("the fiddle playing & the horns Sounding") show the sergeant’s attention to enlisted-men’s experience that the captains’ journals consistently overlook. Ordway also notes, almost in passing, that "Newman & Reed confined," a discipline matter no other narrator mentions on this date.
Gass introduces a sourer note absent from the other accounts:
Last night the Indians stole an axe from our cook, which of course in some degree diminished our confidence, and lessened the amicable character we had conceived of them.
The theft does not appear in Clark, Ordway, or Whitehouse for this date. Gass’s editorial framing — "diminished our confidence" — also stands at odds with his own celebrated assessment of the Arikara elsewhere as "the best looking" and "most cleanly Indians" he had seen, and with Clark’s blunter verdict that they are "Dirty, Kind, pore, & extravegent." The captain and the sergeant arrive at almost opposite first impressions of the same hosts.
Clark the Ethnographer
What sets Clark’s entry apart is the long ethnographic appendix he attaches after the day’s narrative ends. He estimates Arikara fighting strength at 500 (citing the trader Tabeau’s higher figure of 600), describes them as "the remains of ten different tribes of Panias reduced by the Small Pox & wares with the Sioux," and provides a detailed architectural description of the earth lodges — "30 to 40 feet in Diamuter Covered with earth on Neet Poles Set end wise resting on 4 forks." He notes the Sioux trader Cameron of St. Peters as the conduit by which Sioux dominance over the Arikara is maintained, and describes a hospitality custom involving women that Whitehouse, Gass, and Ordway pass over in silence.
Whitehouse’s entry is the day’s most revealing in its brevity. His three lines — that they set off about noon, that a native joined them as far as the Mandans, that they camped on the north shore — exactly parallel Gass’s closing sentences and suggest either direct copying from a shared source or the kind of skeleton entry a less practiced writer produced when he had not personally witnessed the council. The pattern repeats throughout the expedition’s records: when Whitehouse is brief, his minimal facts almost always overlap with Gass’s, while Ordway and Clark each pursue their own distinct interests — Ordway toward the men and the trade, Clark toward the political and ethnographic frame the captains were charged with constructing.
