The entries for November 6, 1804, find the Corps of Discovery settling into their winter quarters at Fort Mandan in present-day North Dakota. Three journalists — John Ordway, Patrick Gass, and William Clark — record the day’s events, but the texture and focus of their accounts diverge sharply. Read together, the entries reveal how differently each man weighed the same twenty-four hours, and how Clark’s expansive observational habit captured details that his subordinates either missed or chose to omit.
A Shared Event, Three Registers
All three narrators note the departure of a small party descending the Missouri in a pirogue. Ordway identifies the travelers as “our french man who came with us from the R. A. Rees as an Intreperter and Several of our french” who “have Set off to descend the River in a pearogue.” Gass, characteristically, says nothing of the departure at all — his entry instead reads as a generic river-travel passage:
passed a handsome bottom prairie on the north side ; at the upper end of which is a grove of cotton wood, and a long range of dark coloured bluffs on the south side. About 9 o’clock it began to rain and we had strong wind ahead.
This is striking, because the expedition was no longer traveling — they had reached the Mandan villages and were constructing winter huts. Gass’s entry appears to belong to a different day or to be reconstructed from earlier travel notes, a reminder that his published journal, edited by David McKeehan in 1807, sometimes smooths or displaces field observations.
Clark, by contrast, names the departing men with care: “Mr. Jo Gravilin our ricare interpeter Paul premor, Lajuness & 2 french Boys, who Came with us, Set out in a Small perogue, on their return to the ricaree nation & the Illinois.” He also explains the strategic purpose of the mission — Gravelines is “to accompany the Ricaras Chiefs to the City of Washington in the Spring” — a diplomatic detail Ordway gestures toward but does not fully articulate, and that Gass omits entirely.
Clark Alone Records the Aurora
The most arresting disparity concerns the previous night’s aurora borealis. Ordway alludes to it only obliquely, noting that the “Greater part of last night” was clear (an editorial footnote in the Wisconsin Historical Collections supplies the connection to a northern-lights display). Gass makes no mention of the phenomenon. Clark, however, devotes his longest passage of the day to it:
last night late we wer awoke by the Sergeant of the Guard to See a nothern light, which was light, not red, and appeared to Darken and Some times nearly obscered, and open, many times appeared in light Streeks, and at other times a great Space light & containing floating Collomns which appeared opposite each other & retreat leaveing the lighter Space at no time of the Same appearence
The description is careful and sustained — Clark notes color (“light, not red”), the rhythm of brightening and obscuring, the geometry of “floating Collomns” advancing and retreating. That the sergeant of the guard woke the captain specifically to witness the display suggests an established understanding within the camp that Clark wished to be alerted to unusual natural phenomena. The other journalists, also presumably awakened or at least aware, did not consider the event worth recording in detail.
Weather, Geese, and the Coming Winter
A second pattern emerges in how each narrator registers the turn toward winter. Ordway notes the morning clouded up and “lookfed] likely for Snow.” Clark observes that “at 8 oClock the wind begun to blow hard from the N W. and Cold, and Continud all Day,” and adds an ecological signal absent from the others: “Great numbers of Geese pass to the South which is a certain approach of ice.” Clark also remarks on the practical labor underway — “Continue to build the huts, out of Cotton Timber, &c. this being the only timber we have” — grounding the entry in the immediate task of preparing Fort Mandan for occupation.
Across these three entries, a familiar division of labor emerges. Ordway provides a serviceable middle register, naming events without elaboration. Gass’s published text drifts away from the day’s actual circumstances. Clark, the captain whose journal would form the documentary backbone of the expedition’s record, attends simultaneously to personnel, diplomacy, weather, wildlife, celestial phenomena, and construction — a range of attention that explains why his volumes remain the indispensable source for any single date in the expedition’s chronology.
