The entries of November 16, 1804 illustrate how the Lewis and Clark journals fracture into parallel viewpoints once the expedition divided its labor. While William Clark and John Ordway both record the morning’s heavy frost and the ongoing construction at the new winter quarters, Patrick Gass writes from elsewhere entirely — returning overland from a hunt near the mouth of a creek he reckons fourteen miles from the White River. Read together, the three accounts reconstruct a fort under construction, a hunting party rejoining the main body, and a tense diplomatic encounter, none of which any single narrator describes in full.
A Shared Frost, Differently Rendered
Both Clark and Ordway open with the weather, and the parallels are striking enough to suggest the men were standing in the same fog. Clark notes:
a verry white frost all the trees all Covered with ice, Cloudy, all the men move into the huts which is not finishd
Ordway, writing in a more expressive register, reaches for comparison:
with frost which was verry course white & thick even on the Bows of the trees all this day. Such a frost I never Saw in the States
The two entries agree on the basic phenomenon — a hoarfrost coating the cottonwoods along the Missouri — but their framings diverge. Clark’s prose is administrative, moving immediately from weather to the practical fact that the men have shifted into the half-built huts. Ordway pauses to register astonishment, measuring the Dakota frost against his New England experience. Clark, the commanding officer, treats the cold as a condition to be managed; Ordway, the sergeant, treats it as a marvel worth describing. Gass, who is not present at the fort, mentions no frost at all — a useful reminder that weather entries in the journals reflect where each writer stood, not a single objective record.
Building the Fort: Ordway’s Specifics, Clark’s Overview
Ordway provides the dimensions Clark omits. He records that the party
continued building, raised a provision & Smoak house 24 feet by 14 f.
Clark, by contrast, summarizes the same labor in a single clause — “men imployed untill late in dobing their huts” — and notes that the men had moved into quarters that were “not finishd.” This division of detail is characteristic of the two journalists across the winter at Fort Mandan: Ordway tends to log the measurable (board-feet, dimensions, distances), while Clark abstracts the day’s work into a sentence and reserves space for command-level concerns. Anyone reconstructing the physical layout of Fort Mandan must lean on Ordway here; anyone reconstructing the diplomatic environment must lean on Clark.
The Pistol, the Assiniboine, and a Detail Only Clark Records
The most consequential passage of the day appears only in Clark’s journal. An older Hidatsa visitor — Clark calls them the “Big bellie” — arrives with intelligence that the Assiniboine are camped nearby and that horse-stealing tensions are mounting. The visitor brings
4 buffalow robes & Corn to trade for a pistol which we did not let him have
Clark’s refusal is terse and unexplained, but the entry’s closing lines reveal the captains’ calculus: horses are being moved into the woods near the fort specifically “to prevent the Ossniboins Steeling them.” Arming one party in a brewing intertribal dispute would have compromised the expedition’s posture of neutrality and may also have run against the captains’ standing reluctance to circulate firearms beyond the corps. Neither Ordway nor Gass mentions the trade attempt — a reminder that Clark, alone among the day’s narrators, was party to the diplomatic conversations conducted at the captains’ quarters.
Gass’s Independent Narrative
Gass’s entry belongs to a different geography. He describes level upland plains “with a great number of goats and buffaloe,” a hunt that yielded three deer, and a return to camp where the rest of his party had killed “some deer and two buffaloe.” His prose is the most economical of the three and the most spatially precise, giving distances and compass bearings (“a S. E. course”) that neither Clark nor Ordway offers. That his account does not overlap with the others on this date underscores how the journals function as a distributed record: on November 16, no single narrator saw the whole expedition, and only by reading them together does the day come into focus.
