The entries dated 29 December 1804 from William Clark, John Ordway, and Patrick Gass illustrate how differently three members of the Corps of Discovery filtered the same wintering experience at Fort Mandan. Clark, the commanding officer, fixes his attention on instruments and atmosphere. Ordway, the orderly sergeant, records the day’s economic and social transactions with the surrounding Mandan and Hidatsa villages. Gass, writing his published narrative in a more retrospective mode, sweeps several days into a single summary of hunting losses and weather shifts. Read together, the three accounts reconstruct a fuller picture of the post than any one narrator preserves alone.
Clark’s Thermometer, Ordway’s Ledger
Clark’s entry is brief and almost entirely meteorological. He notes the depth of the frost and reports the morning temperature with the precision of a man keeping a scientific log:
The frost fell last night nearly a 1/4 of an inch Deep and Continud to fall untill the Sun was of Some bite, the Murcurey Stood this morning at 9 d below 0 which is not considered Cold, as the Changes take place gradually without long intermitions
The aside — that nine below zero “is not considered Cold” because the cold has set in gradually — reflects Clark’s interest in acclimatization as a phenomenon worth recording for Jefferson’s eventual readers. He closes only with the terse observation, “a number of Indians here,” leaving entirely to Ordway the question of who those visitors were and what they were doing.
Ordway fills in precisely that gap. While Clark watches the mercury, Ordway watches the door of the interpreter’s quarters and the newly fitted blacksmith’s shop:
a Great nomber of the natives men women & children visited us the whole day as we Got the Black-smiths Shop fixed they Brought their Squaw axes & kittle to fix and mend for which they Gave us corn & beans Squasshes & C.
This is one of the earliest concrete records of the corn-for-ironwork trade that would sustain the expedition through the Missouri winter. Ordway also captures a market detail Clark omits — that the hunter who killed a wolf “kept it for the tradors who Give as much for a woolf Skin as a Beever Skin” — and a small frontier-policing incident: “an Indian Stole a drawing nife. took it again.” The clipped phrasing, with its silent recovery of the tool, is characteristic of Ordway’s matter-of-fact register.
Gass’s Compressed Calendar
Gass’s entry, by contrast, reads less like a daily journal than a paragraph in a published memoir, which is essentially what his manuscript became after McKeehan’s 1807 editing. Rather than describing 29 December specifically, Gass folds together hunting results, a frostbite case, and a multi-day weather sequence:
They had killed a buffaloe, a wolf and two porcupines: and one of the men had got his feet so badly frozen that he was unable to come to the fort.
The wolf in Gass’s tally is almost certainly the same animal Ordway logs in his trading note, but Gass strips away the commercial context and presents it simply as game. His attention then shifts to the frostbitten hunter — a human-interest detail neither Clark nor Ordway records on this date — before tracking the weather forward: “During the 15th and 16th the weather was warm, and the snow melted fast… On the 17th it became cold; the wind blew hard from the north, and it began to freeze.” The dates Gass gives are inconsistent with the late-December placement of this passage in the database, suggesting either editorial compression or a manuscript dating slip, a known feature of his narrative.
Three Registers, One Post
The contrast in voice is instructive. Clark writes as the officer-scientist, quantifying frost depth and mercury readings. Ordway writes as a sergeant on duty, cataloguing visitors, transactions, and minor breaches of order. Gass writes as a storyteller summarizing for an absent audience, prioritizing narrative arc — successful hunt, injured man, shifting weather — over date-by-date precision. None of the three appears to be copying another here; their entries are independent enough that each preserves information the others lose. Clark alone gives the temperature; Ordway alone documents the blacksmith trade and the attempted theft; Gass alone preserves the frostbite episode and the recent thaw-freeze cycle. The day at Fort Mandan emerges only when their three registers are placed in conversation.
