The entries of December 19, 1804 offer an unusually clean cross-section of life at the half-built Fort Mandan. Four narrators — William Clark, Patrick Gass, John Ordway, and Joseph Whitehouse — were all present at the same post on the same moderating winter day, yet each produced a markedly different account. Read together, the entries illustrate how the expedition’s documentary record was shaped less by what happened than by what each writer considered worth preserving.
Two Witnesses to the Pickets
Whitehouse and Ordway both attend to the same construction project, but at different levels of detail. Whitehouse’s entry is among the briefest in his journal for the month:
a clear pleasant day: we began to Set up the pickets of our fort.
Ordway, writing of the same labor, supplies the operational detail Whitehouse omits — the rotation system that the cold imposed on the work party:
we went about Setting up our pickets, half the men out at a time & relieved every hour, it being too cold to be out all the time.
The pairing is characteristic. Whitehouse, a private, tends toward terse weather-and-task notations; Ordway, a sergeant with supervisory responsibility, more often records the management of men. Where Whitehouse marks the day “clear pleasant,” Ordway implicitly contradicts him: it was cold enough that no man could remain outside for more than an hour. Both can be true — a sunlit Northern Plains December day can be brilliant and brutal at once — but the divergence shows how rank and role colored the register of each journal.
Gass on the Hunt, Clark at the Map
Gass, the carpenter-sergeant whose journal often runs longer than Ordway’s or Whitehouse’s, ignores the pickets entirely on this date and turns instead to game. He folds in a retrospective observation from the previous day’s hunt and tallies the day’s returns:
While out hunting yesterday I saw about three hundred goats, and some buffaloe. Deer are not so plenty here as lower down the river, but elk, buffaloe and goats, are very numerous. Four hunters went out to day and in the evening returned with 7 deer and three elk.
The “goats” here are pronghorn antelope, a species the captains were still working to describe with precision. Gass’s comparative remark — that deer are scarcer here than “lower down the river” — is the kind of ecological observation that distinguishes his journal from Whitehouse’s and Ordway’s, both of whom rarely venture such comparisons. He also notes a creek passed “on the south side” and an encampment “on the north side,” phrasing that appears to be a holdover from travel-narrative habits even though the party was now stationary at Fort Mandan; this suggests Gass may have drafted portions of his entry from earlier notes or was retaining a familiar formula.
Clark’s entry is the shortest of the four and the most revealing of his distinctive winter labor:
The wind from S. W. the weather moderated a little, I engage my self in Connecting the Countrey from information. river rise a little
While the enlisted men set pickets and hunters chased elk, Clark was indoors compiling cartographic information — almost certainly from Mandan and Hidatsa informants, French-Canadian engagés, and traders moving through the post. The phrase “Connecting the Countrey from information” is a compact description of the synthetic mapwork that would eventually feed into the great manuscript map of 1805. Notably, neither Lewis (who has no entry for this date in the surviving record) nor any of the sergeants mentions this activity. Were Clark’s journal lost, the cartographic labor of December 19 would be invisible.
What Each Narrator Misses
The cross-narrator pattern for this date is one of complementary blind spots. Whitehouse and Ordway record the pickets but not the hunt; Gass records the hunt but not the pickets; Clark records neither, attending instead to wind, river stage, and his own desk-work. No single entry would give a reader an adequate picture of the day. Only when read together do the four journals reconstruct a fort under simultaneous construction, provisioning, and intellectual assembly — pickets rising, elk arriving, and a map of the upper Missouri taking shape on Clark’s table.
