The entries for 30 October 1804 capture a pivotal moment in the search for winter quarters near the Mandan villages. William Clark, John Ordway, and Patrick Gass each record the same upriver scouting expedition to an island roughly six or seven miles above the camp, but the three accounts diverge sharply in scope, register, and the details each narrator considers worth preserving. Read together, they reveal both the chain of information that flowed from captain to sergeant to private and the independent observations that each man brought to his page.
One Reconnaissance, Three Reports
Clark, who actually led the party, gives the fullest reasoning. He explains that he set out because “it being near the tim the ice begins to run at this place, and the Countrey after a few leagues high is Said to be barron of timber.” His reconnaissance was governed by two practical constraints — the freeze and the scarcity of wood — and his conclusion is grounded in firsthand observation:
found the wood on the Isd. as also on the pt. above So Distant from the water that, I did not think that we Could get a good wintering ground there, and as all the white men here informed us that wood was Sceres, as well as game above, we Deturmined to drop down a fiew miles near wood and game
Ordway compresses this same trip into a single sentence of result without the reasoning: the party “returned and enformed us that it the place was not Suitable for us to winter.” Gass is briefer still, noting only that the scouts “were of opinion that it was not an eligible place.” Notably, Gass attributes the expedition to Captain Lewis rather than Clark — an error that suggests he was not on the boat himself and reconstructed the day from secondhand camp talk, perhaps confusing which captain had departed. Ordway, by contrast, correctly identifies “Cap*. Clark and 8 of the party,” matching Clark’s own “I took 8 men in a Small perogue.”
What Each Narrator Notices
The most revealing divergence concerns the Mandan visitors. Clark, occupied with diplomacy, records the arrival of two chiefs who had missed the previous day’s council, the placement of a medal on “the Big White,” and a separate visit from “Ka gar no mogh ge the 2d Chief of the 2d Village,” who invited the captains to the village to receive corn. He even appends an ethnographic judgment — that “Those nations know nothing of reagular Councils, and know not how to proceed in them” — a comment that says as much about Clark’s expectations of formal diplomatic procedure as about Mandan practice.
Ordway, who as sergeant of the guard would have been stationed in camp, ignores the chiefs entirely and instead documents what passed at the camp’s edge: the trade in foodstuffs. His description of Mandan provisions is the most sensory of the three:
Some corn & Bread made of the corn meal parched & mixed with fat &. C. which eats verry well
He also grasps the regional economy with a clarity neither captain bothers to record, noting that the Mandans “raise pleanty off for themselves & to trade with other nations.” Gass, whose entry is the shortest, notes only that “The day was clear and pleasant” — the kind of weather observation that Clark relegates to a marginal “Wind S. E.”
Dancing, Drams, and Register
All three men were present for the evening’s entertainment, but only Clark and (implicitly) Ordway record it. Clark writes that he “gave the party a dram, they Danced as is verry Comn. in the evening which pleased the Savages much,” while Ordway’s entry breaks off before the evening. The dram — the issued ration of spirits — is a detail Clark mentions matter-of-factly as cause; the dancing is effect. The exchange illustrates a pattern visible across these three journals: Clark thinks in terms of negotiation and consequence, Ordway in terms of material exchange and daily provisioning, and Gass in terms of summary fact. Where Clark’s prose runs to compound sentences with embedded reasoning, Gass’s clipped declaratives (“The day was clear and pleasant”) suggest a writer working from notes or memory after the fact, smoothing the day into its essentials.
The collective record of 30 October thus offers a layered portrait: a captain weighing timber, ice, and protocol; a sergeant cataloguing the corn trade at the camp’s threshold; and a private reducing the day to weather and outcome. The decision to abandon the island and “drop down to th next point below” — the site that would become Fort Mandan — emerges from Clark’s pen alone, but the surrounding texture of the day survives only because three men wrote.
