The journals of Patrick Gass, John Ordway, and William Clark for December 10, 1804 describe the same sequence of events at Fort Mandan: Captain Lewis’s return from a hunting excursion, the recovery of meat by horseback, and the steadily plunging temperature. Yet each narrator filters the day through a distinct sensibility, and a side-by-side reading exposes both shared scaffolding and individual preoccupations.
A Shared Skeleton of Events
All three men anchor their entries to the return of Lewis’s party and the transport of meat. Clark, writing as commanding officer, supplies the operational frame:
Capt. Lewis returned, to day at 12 oClock leaveing 6 men at the Camp to prepare the meat for to pack 4 Horse loads Came in
Gass, who was himself among the returning party, narrates from the inside of that movement: “tain Lewis and four of us set out for the fort. Four hunters and another man to keep camp remained out.” His account preserves the granular bookkeeping of who stayed and who marched — “Five encamped out” — a detail neither Clark nor Ordway bothers to reproduce. Ordway, by contrast, focuses on the men who went back down to retrieve the cached meat: “Several of the hunters returned down to their last nights camp for meat, they returned with large loads of meat.”
The three accounts thus form a kind of relay. Gass writes from the perspective of the returning detachment, Ordway from the perspective of the fort sending men out to meet them, and Clark from the perspective of the commander tallying loads and remaining personnel.
Measuring the Cold
Each narrator reaches for a different instrument to convey the day’s severity. Clark, characteristically, gives a number:
a verry Cold Day The Thermometer to day at 10 & 11 Degrees below 0.
Gass, lacking access to the thermometer or uninterested in it, substitutes an experimental anecdote that has become one of the more memorable images of the Fort Mandan winter:
an experiment was made with proof spirits, which in fifteen minutes froze into hard ice.
Ordway gestures toward the same instrumental reading Clark records but leaves the figure unfilled — “the weather is [blank in Ms.] degrees colder this evening than it was this morning” — suggesting he intended to consult the official record later and never did. He instead offers a human-scale index of the cold: “the Sentinel had to be relieved every hour.” Where Clark quantifies and Gass dramatizes, Ordway measures cold by its effect on duty rotations.
What Each Man Notices Alone
The most telling divergences lie in the details that appear in only one journal. Clark alone records Lewis’s personal hardship the previous night:
Capt Lewis had a Cold Disagreeable night last in the Snow on a Cold point with one Small Blankett
This sympathetic notice of his co-captain’s exposure, along with the observation that “The men which was frost bit is gitting better,” reflects Clark’s habitual attentiveness to the physical condition of the corps. He also notes the buffalo crossing the river “in emence herds without brakeing in” — an ecological observation absent from the other two journals, and one with practical implications for ice strength and future hunting.
Ordway alone records two events of considerable significance. First, a diplomatic and medical encounter: “one of the Mandan Indians who had been wounded by the Souix came to our officers to be cured.” Neither Clark nor Gass mentions this visit, despite its bearing on the expedition’s emerging role as a source of medical aid among the Mandan. Second, Ordway notes that “Blanket cappoes provided for each man who Stood in need of them” — a quartermaster’s detail that complements, but is not duplicated by, Clark’s mention of frostbite recovery.
Gass, the carpenter-sergeant whose published 1807 narrative would be the first from the expedition to reach print, writes in the tightest and most polished prose of the three. His entry has already been smoothed for a reading audience: complete sentences, parallel construction, and the rhetorical flourish of the proof-spirits experiment. Ordway’s and Clark’s entries retain the texture of field notes — blanks, abbreviations, and the practical accounting of horse loads and sentinel reliefs.
Read together, the three entries demonstrate how a single winter day at Fort Mandan generates multiple, mutually reinforcing but non-redundant records. No one narrator captures the whole; the historian gains the fullest picture only by holding all three in view.
