The journal entries dated January 13, 1805 offer a revealing case study in how three members of the Corps of Discovery filtered the same winter day at Fort Mandan through markedly different lenses. Sergeant John Ordway and Captain William Clark both anchor their entries in the immediate circumstances of the post — meat scarcity, Indigenous visitors, and the return of the interpreter Toussaint Charbonneau from a journey to the Hidatsa villages. Patrick Gass’s published journal, by contrast, contains an entry for this date that describes a wholly different landscape, raising familiar questions about the editorial history of his text.
Convergence: Scarcity and Charbonneau’s Return
Ordway’s brief entry foregrounds the social pressure that hunger placed on the fort. He observes that with meat scarce among the Mandan, visitors arrived seeking provisions:
the Savages visit us as meat is Scarce among them they Intrude on us and we use them as well as possable. Mr Sharbinow arived in the evening with the horses loaded with Grees fat meat &C.
Clark records the same return but treats it as the occasion for an extended ethnographic and geopolitical commentary. Where Ordway condenses the day into two sentences, Clark explains the structural cause of the scarcity Ordway merely names. The Mandan, he writes, kill buffalo in quantity but preserve only a portion, leaving them “more than half of their time without meat,” while corn and beans are reserved against summer and against the threat of Sioux attack. Both narrators independently confirm that Charbonneau and a companion had traveled to the Hidatsa (Minitari) lodges; Clark adds the telling physical detail that they returned “both frosed in their faces.”
Divergence: Clark’s Diplomatic Antennae
Clark’s entry alone registers a strand of intelligence that would shape the captains’ winter diplomacy. Charbonneau, he reports, brought back word that the Hudson’s Bay Company clerk among the Hidatsa had been “Speaking Some fiew expressns. unfavourable towards us,” and that the rival North West Company intended to plant a fort at the Hidatsa village. Clark also relays the chilly reception the Hidatsa principal chief gave the American presence:
he Saw the Grand Chief of the Big bellies who Spoke Slightly of the Americans, Saying if we would give our great flag to him he would Come to See us.
Ordway, occupying a sergeant’s vantage, captures none of this. His register remains domestic and logistical — who arrived, what they brought, how the garrison managed visitors. The contrast illustrates a recurring pattern across the winter journals: Clark routinely absorbs intelligence funneled through Charbonneau and converts it into strategic prose, while Ordway documents the texture of daily life inside the stockade. Neither account is complete without the other, but the analytical depth belongs to the captain.
The Gass Anomaly
Patrick Gass’s entry for January 13, 1805 presents a different kind of problem. He describes wind too strong for small canoes, Frenchmen trapping beaver, passage of “Onion creek,” a 23-mile day, and a wild goose nest discovered “on tree about 60 feet high” containing a single egg:
We came 23 miles and encamped on North side, where we found a wild goose nest on tree about 60 feet high. One of the men climbed the tree and found one egg in the nest.
None of this is consistent with mid-January at Fort Mandan, where the Corps was wintered in, the Missouri was frozen, and goose nesting lay months away. The passage is almost certainly displaced material from the spring or early summer of 1805, when the expedition was again moving by water and Lewis recorded similar observations of geese nesting in cottonwoods above the river. The discrepancy is a useful reminder that Gass’s journal as published in 1807 by David McKeehan was heavily reworked from the sergeant’s original notes — notes that have not survived independently — and that its dating cannot be relied upon without corroboration from Lewis, Clark, or Ordway.
Reading the Day in the Round
Taken together, Ordway and Clark provide a coherent picture of January 13 at Fort Mandan: a cold, clear Sunday on which roughly half the Mandan nation moved downriver to hunt, hungry visitors pressed the fort for hospitality, and Charbonneau returned frostbitten with both grease-fat meat and unwelcome news of British commercial ambitions among the Hidatsa. Gass’s entry, whatever its original date, must be set aside for this day. The episode underscores the value of cross-narrator reading not only for triangulating events but for detecting the editorial seams in the published record.
This analysis was AI-assisted and reviewed by a human editor prior to publication.
