The first day of December 1804 produced parallel journal entries from William Clark, Sergeant John Ordway, and Sergeant Patrick Gass. All three men were physically inside the same partially built stockade, watching the same visitors arrive, yet their accounts diverge in telling ways. Comparing them illuminates the chain of information at Fort Mandan: Clark, as commander, hears the diplomatic substance directly from Mandan emissaries; the sergeants receive a filtered version and supply the camp-level color.
The Same Labor, Different Framings
All three narrators open with the construction of the fort’s pickets. Gass, the carpenter by trade, gives the most active phrasing:
we began to cut and carry pickets to complete our fort.
Ordway is similarly practical, noting the men were "bringing the pickets & preparing to picket in our Garrison &. C." Clark, characteristically, condenses the labor into a single clause—"all hands ingaged in pitting pickets"—before turning to the diplomatic news that occupies the bulk of his entry. The register difference is consistent with the broader pattern across the winter: the sergeants document the work of the enlisted men, while Clark uses the labor as a frame for command-level intelligence.
The Cheyenne Arrival: A Telephone Game in Three Voices
The day’s central event is the arrival of Cheyenne (Shar ha) visitors at the Mandan village. Here the three accounts diverge sharply in both numbers and substance. Ordway reports a sweeping figure:
a large nomber 300 lodge of the Shian or [blank in Ms] nation had come to their villages
Gass echoes the alarmist register without specifying numbers, calling them "a great number of the Chien or Dog nation." Clark, who received the report directly from "the half brother of the man who was killed," gives a far smaller and more accurate count: "Six Chiens So Called by the french Shar ha Indians had arrived with a pipe." The discrepancy between Clark’s six envoys and Ordway’s three hundred lodges suggests how rapidly intelligence inflated as it passed from the captains’ council down to the enlisted ranks—or, alternatively, that the sergeants conflated the Cheyenne diplomatic party with a separate report of a larger encampment.
Only Clark records the diplomatic stakes. He alone notes the Mandans’ fear that the Cheyennes, "at peace with the Seaux," intended harm, and he alone preserves the chiefs’ reported speech in quotation:
it was our wish that they Should not be hurt, and forbid being Killed &c.
The pipe-bearing protocol, the gift of tobacco, and the Mandan-Arikara-Sioux geopolitical triangle are entirely absent from Ordway and Gass. The sergeants register that something happened; Clark records what it meant.
The Scotsman and the Competing Companies
The day’s second visitor was a British trader. Here Ordway is unusually expansive—more so than Clark himself in this entry. Ordway identifies the company affiliation, the goods, and even the geography of the British posts:
he belonged to the hudson bay company … he brought over Tobacco Beeds & other kinds of Goods. & traded with the Mandens for their furs & buffalow Robes … this hudsons bay compy lay Garrisoned near the N. W. Compy on River [blank in Ms.] Eight or 10 days travel by land a North course from this.
Gass, by contrast, misidentifies the visitor’s employer, calling him "One of the traders from the North West Company"—a revealing slip given that the two British concerns were rivals operating in close proximity. Clark provides the name—"Mr. G Henderson in the imploy of the hudsons bay Company"—and the trader’s specific commission to deal with "the Gros ventre—or big bellies So Called by the french traders."
The pattern is suggestive. Where diplomacy is concerned, Clark holds information the sergeants lack. Where commercial intelligence is concerned, Ordway has gathered detail on his own initiative, perhaps from direct conversation with Henderson, that goes beyond what Clark bothered to record. Gass, working from a more distant vantage, garbles the corporate identity. The three entries, read together, reconstruct a December day richer than any one of them captures alone.
