The journal entries dated 15 November 1804 capture the Corps of Discovery in a transitional moment: hunters were scattered downriver, ice was thickening on the Missouri, and the men were laboring to complete the huts that would become Fort Mandan. Yet the three narrators present — William Clark, John Ordway, and Patrick Gass — produce strikingly divergent accounts of the day, revealing how rank, role, and editorial circumstance shaped what each man chose to preserve.
Clark’s Command Log
Clark’s entry reads as an officer’s operational record. He opens with weather and river conditions — “a Cloudy morning, the ice run much thicker than yesterday” — before tracking the movement of personnel: George Drouillard and a Frenchman returning from the hunters’ camp “about 30 miles below,” and a man dispatched back with orders to push the meat-laden pirogue through the floating ice. The detail about sending tin “to put on the parts of the Perogue exposed to the ice & a toe roape” is the kind of practical solution one expects from a working captain.
all hands work at their huts untill 1 oClock at night Swans passing to the South but fiew fowls water to be Seen not one Indian Came to our fort to day
Clark closes with three observations stacked without transition: labor, migrating swans, and the absence of Mandan visitors. The juxtaposition is characteristic — environmental and diplomatic intelligence treated as parallel data points worth logging.
Ordway Echoing Clark
Ordway’s entry, as preserved in the Wisconsin Historical Collections edition, demonstrates the well-documented pattern of sergeants drawing on the captains’ notes or shared conversation. His report that the pirogue lay “abt 18 ml below loaded with meat” and that “the frenchman Sent back to the pearogue with a kittle” closely tracks Clark’s account of the same dispatch — though the distances differ (Ordway’s 18 miles versus Clark’s 30), suggesting Ordway recorded an earlier or alternate report. The editor’s footnote makes the borrowing explicit, quoting Clark’s parallel phrase about sending “the man Tin, to put on the parts of the Perogue exposed to the ice & a toe roape.”
Where Ordway diverges from Clark is in the ethnographic material the editor attaches: the visit of Sheheke (Big White), the chief who would later accompany the captains to Washington. The footnote preserves Clark’s earthier observation that the chief “packd about 100lb of fine meet on his squar for us” — a detail Clark himself recorded but did not place in the 15 November entry transcribed here. The layered apparatus around Ordway’s text thus becomes a kind of composite record, with the editor weaving Clark’s voice into Ordway’s narrative to fill what the sergeant left thin.
Gass and the Problem of Place
Gass’s entry is the most disorienting of the three. While Clark and Ordway are unambiguously at the Mandan villages preparing winter quarters, Gass writes of voyaging “early,” passing “a creek on the south side and black bluffs on the north,” and ascending the White River with another man for twelve miles. This is not a Fort Mandan scene at all — it describes country far downstream, encountered weeks earlier in September. The discrepancy reflects the well-known editorial history of Gass’s journal: his original manuscript was lost, and the published 1807 version, ghostwritten by David McKeehan from Gass’s notes, carries dating irregularities and reorganized passages.
Read alongside Clark’s grounded log of ice and huts, Gass’s prose reveals a different register entirely — the retrospective travelogue, smoothed for a reading public:
We found good bottoms on this creek; but timber scarce, and none upon the hills. The current and colour of the water are much like those of the Missouri.
The comparative geography (“much like those of the Missouri”) is the language of a guidebook, not a daily diarist. Where Clark notes swans and absent Indians as raw observation, Gass generalizes terrain for an audience that has never seen it.
Cross-Narrator Patterns
Three patterns emerge from the comparison. First, Clark functions as the documentary anchor: Ordway’s entry depends on him, and the editorial footnotes reach back to Clark to supply context Ordway omitted. Second, Ordway’s strength lies less in independent observation than in preserving incidents — like the kettle and the damaged pirogue bow — that Clark mentions only in passing. Third, Gass’s published text cannot be read as a same-day witness in the way Clark’s and Ordway’s can; it belongs to a different documentary genre entirely. For researchers reconstructing the Fort Mandan winter, Clark remains the primary source, with Ordway as confirming sergeant and Gass as a problematic supplement.
