February 28, 1805 brought a consequential arrival at Fort Mandan: Joseph Gravelines, two Frenchmen, and two Arikara Indians came upriver with letters from the trader Antoine Tabeau, carrying news that the Sioux had effectively declared war on the expedition. The same event is recorded by three narrators — Sergeant John Ordway, Sergeant Patrick Gass, and Captain William Clark — and the divergences among their entries illuminate how information traveled, hardened, and was filtered at the captains’ table.
Three Registers of the Same Warning
Ordway’s account is the most narratively vivid. He reports that the Sioux party which had stolen the expedition’s horses numbered 106 men and had debated killing the soldiers outright:
they held a counsel over them whether to kill them and take their arms and all or not. but while they were doing that our men were off and got clear… they think that we are bad medicine and say that we must be killed.
Ordway frames the news as a story with suspense — the council, the narrow escape, the ideological charge of being declared “bad medicine.” He also names Tabeau (“Mr Tabbo”) directly as the source of the warning letter.
Gass, by contrast, compresses the same intelligence into two sentences. He notes only that “the Sioux had declared war against us, and also against the Mandans and Grossventers,” that they had boasted of the horse robbery at the Arikara village, and that “they intended to massacre the whole of us in the spring.” Gass, characteristically, distills the operational takeaway: war is coming, and the perpetrators of the February 14th theft are now identified. He omits the council scene, the number 106, and the “bad medicine” language that animates Ordway’s telling.
Clark’s entry — the longest and most administratively layered — does something neither sergeant attempts. He writes the day twice, once as a brief field note and once as a fuller diplomatic record, and he situates the Sioux threat inside a wider geopolitical map.
Clark’s Diplomatic Frame
Where Ordway dramatizes and Gass condenses, Clark catalogs. He identifies the hostile bands by name — “the Sisetoons and the 3 upper bands of the Tetons, with the Yanktons of the North” — and traces the supply chain of the threat to a specific North West Company trader:
Mr. T. also informes that Mr. Cameron of St peters has put arms into the hands of the Souis to revenge the death of 3 of his men Killed by the Chipaways latterly…
This detail appears in neither sergeant’s journal. Clark also records the Arikara diplomatic overture that the sergeants largely pass over: the Arikaras’ “avowed intentions of pursueing our Councils” and their wish “to Settle near” the Mandans and join them against the Sioux. Clark immediately reports this to the Mandans, who reply that “they had always wished to be at peace and good neighbours with the Ricaras.” The captain is, in effect, brokering an alliance in real time, and his journal preserves that diplomatic transcript.
Clark adds a further detail of social texture: when the Sioux raiders stopped at the Arikara villages on their return, the Arikaras “being displeased at their Conduct would not give them any thing to eate, that being the greatest insult they could peaceably offer them.” This ethnographic gloss — withheld hospitality as formal rebuke — is the kind of observation Clark routinely makes and the sergeants do not.
What Each Narrator Notices
The three entries also part ways on a parallel event of the day: the dispatch of sixteen men upriver to fell trees for the pirogues that will carry the expedition west when the ice breaks. Ordway, who likely accompanied the party, supplies the labor detail the captains omit — that the men “had Broke Several of their axes.” Gass notes the woodcutting in a single clause. Clark mentions the dispatch but is more interested in noting the gift from the North West Company’s Hugh Heney: a medicinal root said to cure bites from mad dogs and snakes, with usage instructions Clark transcribes verbatim.
The pattern is consistent with what readers of the journals come to expect. Ordway tells the story; Gass extracts the bottom line; Clark records the diplomacy, the named actors, the ethnographic detail, and the curiosities of natural history. On a single day at Fort Mandan, the same arrival generates a tale of narrow escape, a war bulletin, and a state paper.
