The first day of 1805 found the Corps of Discovery wintering at Fort Mandan, and the expedition marked the occasion by sending a party of musicians and dancers into the nearest Mandan village at the chiefs’ invitation. Four men kept records of the day — Captain William Clark, Sergeants John Ordway and Patrick Gass, and Private Joseph Whitehouse — and their accounts diverge in revealing ways. Read together, they show how rank, literacy, and personal preoccupation shaped what each man thought worth preserving.
The Performance and Its Choreography
Ordway, who appears to have been among the fifteen men sent to the village, delivers the most detailed account of the performance itself. He catalogs the instruments — “a fiddle & a Tambereen & a Sounden horn” — and stages the entry as a piece of military theater, with rounds fired at the village entrance and again at its center before the dancing began. His most vivid image belongs to an unnamed Frenchman among the party:
a frenchman danced on his head1 and all danced round him for a Short time then went in to a lodge & danced a while, which pleased them verry much
Ordway tracks the reciprocity of the day in concrete terms: the Mandans “brought victules from different lodges & of different kinds of diet,” along with corn and buffalo robes presented as gifts. His ledger-like attentiveness to the exchange of food, music, and goods reflects the sergeant’s habit of accounting.
Clark, writing from the captain’s vantage at Fort Mandan, opens with the ceremonial frame Ordway omits — “The Day was ushered in by the Discharge of two Cannon” — and counts sixteen men rather than Ordway’s fifteen. Where Ordway’s Frenchman steals the show, Clark spotlights a different performer:
I ordered my black Servent to Dance which amused the Croud verry much, and Some what astonished them, that So large a man Should be active &c.
This is the day’s only mention of York, and it appears only in Clark’s journal. Ordway, present in the village, either did not see York’s dance or did not consider it worth recording.
Diplomacy Beneath the Dancing
Clark alone treats the visit as a diplomatic mission. He explains that he walked up to the village around eleven o’clock specifically “to alay Some little miss understanding which had taken place thro jelloucy and mortificatiion as to our treatment towards them.” He pointedly visits the lodges of all the principal men except two whom he had heard speaking unfavorably, comparing the Americans with the British traders from the north. He records the chiefs’ response — that what had been said “was in just & lafture” — and then pivots to a wholly separate piece of intelligence: the return of the Second Chief and the Black Man from intercepting a war party of one hundred fifty Gros Ventres bound against the Shoshones over a stolen girl, who had been delivered up and the party turned back with the pipe.
None of this geopolitical context appears in Ordway, Gass, or Whitehouse. The sergeants’ party saw the dancing; the captain saw the dancing as cover for negotiation.
Gass the Ethnographer, Whitehouse the Sufferer
Gass’s surviving fragment for the day is brief but distinctive. Where Ordway notes only that the villagers “brought victules,” Gass attends to the meaning of the meal:
After we were done eating they presented a bowlful to a buffaloe head, saying ”eat that.” Their superstitious credulity is so great, that they believe by using the head well the living buffaloe will come and that they will get a supply of meat.
Gass — or his editor David McKeehan, whose hand shapes the published 1807 text — frames the buffalo-calling ceremony in the dismissive vocabulary of “superstitious credulity,” but he is the only narrator on this date to record the ritual at all. The sergeant’s published journal characteristically slows down to describe Indigenous practice where Ordway’s hurries past it.
Whitehouse, by contrast, contributes the day’s shortest and most personal entry. He says nothing of the dance, the diplomacy, or the ceremony, noting instead that the weather was “quite warm for the time a year & pleasant the Snow melted fast,” that he returned to the fort with two other men, and that “my feet got Some easier.” Whitehouse appears not to have been in the village party; his New Year’s Day is one of convalescence in mild weather.
Cross-Narrator Patterns
The four entries together suggest the layered structure of expedition record-keeping. Ordway and Clark agree on the broad outline of the event but differ on small facts (fifteen versus sixteen men) and on which performer mattered — the Frenchman on his head for the sergeant in the crowd, York for the captain who ordered the dance. Gass supplies ethnographic detail neither captain nor fellow sergeant records. Whitehouse, absent from the central event, preserves a private weather-and-body register that the others, focused on ceremony, omit. Where the journals overlap they corroborate; where they diverge, each fills a gap the others leave.
