The entries dated November 4, 1804 from Sergeants Patrick Gass and John Ordway offer a useful case study in how two enlisted journalists, working under the same orders and within the same palisade, produced complementary rather than redundant records. Gass writes in a compressed, retrospective register that gathers several days into a single narrative paragraph; Ordway writes in the present tense of construction, attentive to the physical labor of building Fort Mandan. Read together, the entries sketch a fort that is simultaneously rising from cottonwood timber and embedded in a volatile diplomatic landscape.
Two Registers of the Same Week
Gass’s entry is notably backward-looking. Although dated in early November, his prose folds in events from the preceding days — an injury during the unrigging of the keelboat, a visit from a Mandan informant, and Captain Clark’s abortive punitive expedition against the Sioux:
Captain Clarke and twenty-three men immediately set out with an intention of pursuing the murderers. They went up to the first village of the Mandans, but their warriors did not seem disposed to turn out. They suggested the coldness of the weather ; that the Sioux were too far gone to be overtaken : and put off the expedition to the spring of the year.
Gass is interested in motive and outcome. He records the Mandans’ reasoning — cold weather, distance, seasonal timing — with something close to reported speech, and he closes with a fixed coordinate:
Our fort is called Fort Mandan, and by observation is in N. latitude 47. 21. 33. 8.
The entry moves from human conflict to celestial fix, the kind of summary a reader of a published narrative would expect.
Ordway, by contrast, stays inside the worksite. His sentences accumulate the textures of a construction day:
we got one line of our huts raised So that we got the Eve Beames on & all of large Timber So that it took all the men hard lifting to put the 16 foot eve Beames.
Where Gass abstracts, Ordway measures. The sixteen-foot eave beams, the line of huts, the discharge of French engagés, the pirogue being shaped for a descent of the Missouri — these are details that Gass omits entirely. Ordway also notes the steady traffic of Mandan visitors who came "to see us build our huts, and to See our boats," a small ethnographic observation about indigenous curiosity that Gass, focused on warfare and diplomacy, does not register.
What Each Sergeant Misses
The divergence is instructive. Ordway gives no hint of the Sioux raid that occupies Gass’s paragraph; Gass gives no hint that the men were straining to hoist eave beams. Neither sergeant mentions the arrival of Toussaint Charbonneau, which the captains’ journals record for this date and which would prove, as the curated note observes, "one of the most consequential" personnel decisions of the journey. The Shoshone-speaking wife who would accompany Charbonneau west is invisible in both sergeants’ pages.
This silence is itself a pattern. Gass and Ordway, writing as non-commissioned officers, tend to record what falls within their immediate sphere — labor details, casualties, visible Indian visitors, weather. The recruitment of an interpreter was a captains’ transaction, conducted in a register the sergeants did not share and were not asked to document. Charbonneau enters the expedition’s written record through Clark’s pen, not through the enlisted journals.
Complementary Witnesses
The relationship between these two entries is not one of copying — a phenomenon visible elsewhere in the expedition’s journals, where Ordway’s phrasing sometimes echoes Clark’s — but of complementary specialization. Gass, whose journal would be the first published account of the expedition (1807), already shows the instinct of a narrator shaping events for a future reader: he names the fort, fixes its latitude, and tells a story with conflict and resolution. Ordway, whose manuscript would not appear in print until the twentieth century, writes more like a foreman’s daybook.
For researchers reconstructing the founding week of Fort Mandan, neither sergeant alone is adequate. Gass supplies the diplomatic frame; Ordway supplies the carpentry. The captains supply the personnel decisions — including the quiet arrival of a man whose wife would, within months, become indispensable. Three pens, three vantage points, one cold day on the upper Missouri.
