The hunt of December 9, 1804, was a continuation of the previous day’s pursuit of buffalo through deep snow in the bottoms below Fort Mandan. Captain Lewis took a sizeable detachment with packhorses to retrieve the meat already killed, secure it from wolves and weather, and add what game he could. Three narrators — Patrick Gass on the ground with the hunters, John Ordway back at the garrison, and William Clark commanding the fort — describe the same day, and the small divergences among their accounts illuminate how information moved (and got reshaped) across the expedition’s record-keeping.
Counting the Kill: Ten, Six, or Nine Buffalo?
The most conspicuous discrepancy is the body count. Gass, who was present in the bottom, gives the fullest tally:
We found some buffaloe had come into the woods, and we killed ten of them and a deer. Having dressed them we loaded four horses with meat and sent them with some of the party to the fort.
Ordway, writing from the fort and clearly relying on what returning hunters told him, reports a smaller number:
Cap.t Lewis camped with Several hunters in a Bottom 5 or 6 m.ls down from the Fort and took care of the meat which they had killed in the course of the day which was about Six buffalow in all.
Clark, the commanding officer compiling the official record, splits the difference:
Capt. Lewis Sent in 4 Hors’s loaded with meat, he continued at the hunting Camp near which they killed 9 buffalow.
Gass’s “ten” likely reflects firsthand counting; Ordway’s “about Six” carries its own hedge (“about”) and may conflate the day’s fresh kills with what was sent in; Clark’s “9 buffalow” may represent a separate report relayed by the four horses’ drivers. None of the three is plainly wrong — they are simply standing at different points in the chain of information, and Ordway frankly admits the secondhand nature of his figure.
What Each Narrator Notices
Beyond the count, each man preserves details the others omit. Clark, true to form as the expedition’s meteorologist and diplomat, opens with the temperature — “The Thermometer Stood this morning at 7° above 0, wind from the E” — and then records the day’s Mandan diplomacy: “both interpeters went to the Villages to day at 12 oClock two Chiefs Came loaded with meat one with a dog & Slay also loaded with meat.” Neither Gass nor Ordway mentions the visiting chiefs in their entries for this date, though Ordway does note in passing that “a no[m]ber of the Savvages came to our Garrison. Some of them brought Some fat meat and Gave to our officers.” Ordway thus corroborates Clark’s diplomatic note from the garrison’s perspective, while Gass — out in the bottom with Lewis — has no occasion to mention it at all.
Gass alone supplies the texture of the hunters’ overnight bivouac:
Captain Lewis and the rest of us encamped out, and had, tolerable lodging with the assistance of the hides of the buffaloe we had killed.
This sergeant’s-eye detail — improvised shelter from green hides at seven degrees above zero — is exactly the sort of practical information Gass tends to capture and the captains tend to elide. Clark notes only that Lewis “continued at the hunting Camp,” and Ordway that he “camped with Several hunters in a Bottom.” Neither registers how the men actually slept.
Register and Relay
The three entries also differ in register. Clark’s prose is clipped, administrative, and event-driven: thermometer, wind, men dispatched, chiefs arrived, horses returned. Ordway’s is narrative and slightly distanced, the syntax of a man writing up the day from reports gathered as hunters trickled back: “Some of the hunting party returned in the evening with our horses loaded with fine meat.” Gass’s voice is the most embodied, moving with the party — “down to the bottom where the two men were taking care of the meat” — and naturally adopting the first-person plural of the working hunter.
Read together, the three entries demonstrate how a single day’s labor at Fort Mandan generated parallel records that were neither independent nor identical. Gass observed and counted; Ordway summarized what came back through the gate; Clark synthesized field reports with garrison events into the expedition’s command journal. The discrepancies are not contradictions so much as the predictable refraction of a hunt through three vantages — bottom, fort, and headquarters desk.
