The journal entries dated November 9, 1804, present an unusually clear case study in narrator divergence. All three men — John Ordway, Patrick Gass, and William Clark — were physically together at the partially built Fort Mandan on the north bank of the Missouri, yet their entries for the day diverge so sharply in content and register that a reader unfamiliar with the expedition might assume they describe different events entirely.
Three Registers, One Construction Site
Ordway’s entry is the briefest and most utilitarian. He frames the day around labor and logistics:
morning, we continued building as usal. we expect our hunters Soon as we are in great want of fresh meat, a nomber of the natives visits us everry day.
His sentence is essentially a status report: work proceeds, provisions are low, visitors are constant. Ordway, a sergeant responsible for daily details, writes in the cadence of a duty roster. He notes the Indigenous visitors only as a recurring fact (“everry day”), not as individuals or informants.
Gass, by contrast, presents an entry that does not match the Fort Mandan setting at all. His November 9 text describes high bluffs, a dinner stop at a creek, a deer and two fawns, herds of buffalo on hillsides, and Clark’s enslaved manservant York killing two of them — clearly a river-travel scene rather than a fixed winter encampment. As Gass writes:
This day we saw several gangs or herds of buffaloe on the sides of the hills : one of our hunters killed one, and captain Clarke’s black servant killed two. We encamped at sunset on the south side.
Because Gass’s original field notes were lost and his published journal of 1807 was reworked by editor David McKeehan, dating discrepancies of this kind are well documented. The entry almost certainly belongs to an earlier travel day misaligned in the printed sequence. For cross-narrator analysis, the practical effect is that Gass cannot corroborate Ordway or Clark on the events at Fort Mandan; instead, his text preserves a hunting-and-encampment scene whose specifics — the deer and fawns, York’s two buffalo — appear nowhere in the other two journals for this date.
Clark’s Ethnographic Eye
Clark’s entry is by far the richest and demonstrates the captains’ habit of treating the journal as a mixed instrument: weather log, construction record, natural-history note, and ethnographic memorandum. He opens with conditions Ordway omits — “a verry hard frost this morning” and a cloudy day with northwest wind — then confirms Ordway’s account that the cabins continue to rise “under many disadvantages.”
Where Ordway sees only “natives” passing through, Clark records specifics: “Several Indians pass with flying news.” He notes a small zoological curiosity — a white weasel with a black-tipped tail — and Lewis’s short walk to a nearby hill. Most strikingly, he turns to a sustained observation of the cottonwood timber surrounding the fort and its role in Mandan horse husbandry:
The Mandans Graze their horses in the day on Grass, and at night give them a Stick of Cotton wood to eate, Horses Dogs & people all pass the night in the Same Lodge or round House, Covd. with earth with a fire in the middle
This passage is the kind of ethnographic detail that Ordway, writing in his compressed register, never attempts, and that Gass — at least in his published 1807 text — rarely matches in granularity. Clark closes with a migratory note: “great number of wild gees pass to the South, flew verry high.”
What the Comparison Reveals
The three entries together illustrate a recurring pattern in the expedition’s documentary record. Ordway functions as a steady but minimalist chronicler whose entries establish that something happened. Clark, when stationary and engaged with neighboring peoples, expands into ethnographic and environmental description, recording Mandan practices regarding earth lodges, cottonwood fodder, and shared shelter with horses and dogs. Gass — at least as preserved through McKeehan’s editorial hand — sometimes drifts out of alignment with the others, a reminder that his published journal is a mediated text rather than a raw field record.
For November 9, 1804, the most reliable composite picture comes from reading Ordway and Clark in tandem: a frost-hardened construction day at Fort Mandan, hunters absent and meat short, Mandan visitors moving through with news, a curious white weasel collected, and Clark already cataloging the winter ecology of cottonwood and the domestic architecture of the Mandan villages that would shelter the corps through the months ahead.
