The meeting between the homeward-bound Corps of Discovery and Robert McClellan’s trading expedition near St. Michael’s Prairie produced three distinct accounts on 12 September 1806. Patrick Gass, John Ordway, and William Clark each register the encounter, but the differences in their entries reveal how rank, role, and audience shaped what each man considered worth preserving.
Three Registers of the Same Encounter
Clark’s entry is the most administratively precise. As co-commander, he is concerned with the chain of instructions binding Joseph Gravelines and Pierre Dorion (“old Mr. Durion”) to specific diplomatic tasks. He notes that Gravelines carried a presidential speech and presents intended for the Arikara nation, occasioned by the death in Washington of the Arikara chief sent downriver in spring 1805:
Gravelin was ordered to the Ricaras with a Speach from the president of the U. States to that nation and some presents which had been given the Ricara Cheif who had visited the U. States and unfortunately died at the City of Washington.
Clark then records his own intervention — extending Dorion’s authority to bring “10 or 12 or 3 from each band including the Yanktons” to Washington. This is the entry of an officer still actively shaping federal Indian policy on the river.
Ordway, by contrast, writes as an enlisted sergeant alert to provisions, sociability, and rumor. Where Clark catalogues instructions, Ordway catalogues hospitality:
M^r McLanen gave our officers wine and the party as much whiskey as we all could drink.
Ordway also preserves a striking piece of geopolitical news that Clark omits entirely — that “the Spanyards or Spain towards Mexico had broke out against the u. states United States and have killed a party of americans,” with troops massing at New Orleans and the Red River. Whether garbled or accurate, this rumor of impending war on the southwestern frontier evidently circulated freely among McClellan’s men but did not strike Clark as worth recording in his official log.
What Gass Compresses, Ordway Expands
Gass, writing for what would become the first published account of the expedition, compresses the day into a single paragraph. He reduces McClellan’s twelve-man crew and the elaborate exchange of intelligence to a functional summary:
Our Commanding Officers were acquainted with Mr. M’Clelland, and we halted and remained with him all day, in order to get some satisfactory information from him, after our long absence from the United States.
Gass captures the emotional core — “long absence from the United States” — but strips away the names, the wine, the war rumors, and the diplomatic detail. His phrase that the government’s agents had been sent because Americans “were beginning to be uneasy about us” is more measured than Ordway’s vivid report that the country had heard “we were all killed” or alternatively held by “the Spanyards” in the mines.
The contrast between Gass and Ordway is instructive. Both are sergeants writing parallel narratives, but Ordway’s manuscript preserves the texture of frontier rumor — multiple, contradictory reports of the expedition’s fate — while Gass’s published prose smooths these into a single decorous statement. Ordway also identifies by name the men whom Gass leaves anonymous: Gravelines, Dorion, and the unnamed Frenchman who had accompanied the Corps as far as the Mandan villages in 1804.
Convergences and a Telling Silence
All three narrators agree on the basic sequence: an early start, the meeting with two pirogues belonging to Auguste Chouteau’s trading concern, the encounter with one of McClellan’s hunters, and the rendezvous with McClellan himself. All three note that two small canoes were sent ahead with hunters. Clark and Ordway both record that the party camped together for the night because of weather; Gass says only that they “remained with him all day.”
One detail appears only in Ordway: “Some of our party exchanged robes &C. for Shirts.” After more than two years in skins and leather, the men were quietly re-clothing themselves in the manufactured cotton of the United States. Neither officer thought to mention this small, eloquent act of homecoming — a reminder that the sergeants’ journals often preserve the lived experience of the enlisted men that the captains’ entries pass over in favor of policy and protocol.
