The entries dated 20 November 1804 from William Clark, John Ordway, and Patrick Gass present a revealing puzzle. Clark and Ordway, writing from the rising winter quarters at Fort Mandan, share a coherent scene: the captains move into their completed huts, a strong west wind blows through the afternoon, and Native visitors arrive — some to eat fresh meat, others to scrutinize the new American works. Gass’s entry, by contrast, narrates a day of river travel past collapsing bluffs and a sandbar camp evacuated at one in the morning — events that belong to the expedition’s progress weeks earlier on the lower Missouri. The mismatch is a useful reminder that Gass’s published Journal (1807), edited by David McKeehan, was reorganized from Gass’s field notes and does not always align date-for-date with the manuscript journals of Clark and Ordway.
Clark and Ordway: Convergent Reporting from the Fort
Clark and Ordway corroborate one another closely on the day’s central event. Ordway notes plainly that the “Captains moved in their Room,” while Clark elaborates in his characteristic register:
Capt Lewis & my Self move into our huts, a verry hard wind from the W. all the after part of the day a temperate day Several Indians Came Down to Eat fresh meat
Ordway, the orderly sergeant, frames the same day through the lens of fort labor and logistics: “the work go on as usal.” His entry also captures something Clark omits entirely — the arrival of the man “who is to be our Inter for Grovantares,” almost certainly a reference to the engagement of Toussaint Charbonneau, who had ridden in with four horses loaded with peltry and meat, and “brought another of his wifes with him.” This is one of the earliest expedition references to the household that would soon include Sacagawea, and it is Ordway, not Clark, who supplies it. The pattern is consistent with Ordway’s broader role as a recorder of camp arrivals, departures, and personnel matters that the captains sometimes pass over.
Clark’s Diplomatic Ear
Where Ordway logs commerce and weather, Clark turns to geopolitics. Three chiefs from the second Mandan village remained at the fort all day, and Clark uses the occasion to record intelligence about Sioux aggression upriver:
Those Chiefs informs us that the Souix settled on the Missourie above Dog River, threten to attacked them this winter, and have treated 2 Ricares who Carried the pipe of peace to them Verry roughly. whiped & took their horses from them
The passage shows Clark functioning as the expedition’s diplomatic stenographer. He notes the chiefs’ displeasure with the Arikara — for making peace with the Mandans through American mediation — and reassures himself in the journal that “we gave them a Sattisfactory answer.” Ordway, writing the same day in the same compound, registers none of this. The division of attention is characteristic: Clark tracks the political register of Indian visits; Ordway tracks the material one (fresh meat, peltry, horses, wives, work).
The Gass Anomaly
Gass’s entry under this date describes a wholly different landscape — bluffs of dark, dissolving earth that color the Missouri, a long chain of them on the north side, and a midnight evacuation when the cutbank began to give way:
the bank where we were stationed began to fall so much, that we were obliged to rouse all hands, and go on a mile and cross the river before we could again encamp.
This is not Fort Mandan country. The reference to crossing the neck of the Grand Bend places the action far downriver, near present-day central South Dakota, weeks before the party reached the Mandan villages on 27 October. The published Gass text — the only version of his journal to survive — was prepared by McKeehan from Gass’s now-lost original notebooks, and the editor’s redating and recompression of entries is a known feature of the 1807 imprint. Researchers using Gass alongside Clark and Ordway should treat his datelines as approximate guides rather than fixed coordinates.
Gass’s geological aside is nonetheless valuable on its own terms. His explanation that the bluffs “dissolve like sugar” and that “every rain washes down great quantities” of earth into the current offers one of the expedition’s clearest lay accounts of why the Missouri runs muddy all the way to the Mississippi. It is the sort of synthesizing observation Gass — or his editor — favored, and which the more transactional entries of Clark and Ordway on this date do not attempt.
