The journals kept at Fort Mandan on 29 November 1804 illustrate how three narrators of unequal rank and literary register filtered the same winter day through different priorities. William Clark, as co-commander, attends to diplomacy and weather data; Sergeant John Ordway records the practical labor of securing the boat; and Sergeant Patrick Gass — writing retrospectively and conflating events of the 29th and 30th — emphasizes incident and narrative shape. Read together, the entries reconstruct a fuller picture than any single journal supplies.
Snow, Ice, and the Falling River
All three men note the cold, but their measurements and emphases diverge. Ordway opens with a precise figure and a clear sky:
about 12 Inches on a level, a cold frosty clear morning… the River fell abt 2 feet last night So that our Boat lay dry on Shore, we took out the mast & every thing which was in hir & let hir lay as She appeared to be Safe.
Clark records a slightly deeper accumulation and adds a detail Ordway omits — that the river had frozen above the village:
Some Snow last night the Detpt of the Snow is various in the wood about 13 inches, The river Closed at the Village above and fell last night two feet.
The one-inch discrepancy between Ordway’s twelve and Clark’s thirteen inches is characteristic of the two men’s habits: Ordway tends to give round, level-ground figures, while Clark notes variability (“various in the wood”). Both agree on the two-foot drop in the river, the practical consequence of which Ordway alone develops — the keelboat now lay dry, requiring its mast and contents to be removed. Gass, writing in a more compressed and literary mode, telescopes this work into a single phrase, “to unrig the boat,” and immediately pivots to the day’s most dramatic episode.
The Dislocated Shoulder and the Sioux Alarm
Gass is the only narrator on this date to mention an injury during the unrigging:
by an accident one of the sergeants had his shoulder dislocated.
That “one of the sergeants” is conspicuously vague — Gass himself was a sergeant, as were Ordway and Pryor — and neither Ordway nor Clark corroborates the incident in their entries for this day. Gass also folds in events properly belonging to 30 November: the arrival of a Mandan reporting a Sioux attack on his hunting party, and Clark’s subsequent sortie with twenty-three men to the upper Mandan village, where the warriors declined to pursue the raiders, citing cold and distance. This compression is typical of Gass, whose published journal was edited by David McKeehan from field notes and frequently smooths multiple days into a single narrative arc. Readers comparing Gass to Clark and Ordway should treat his datelines as approximate.
Larocque, Medals, and the Diplomacy Ordway Misses
The most consequential entry of the day appears only in Clark’s journal. François-Antoine Larocque, the North West Company trader, arrived at the fort, and Clark used the visit to enforce American sovereignty over Indian diplomacy:
Mr. La Rock and one of his men Came to visit us we informed him what we had herd of his intentions of makeing Chiefs &c. and forbid him to give meadels or flags to the Indians, he Denied haveing any Such intention.
The compromise — that one of the captains’ interpreters would speak for Larocque so long as his words “tended to trade alone” — is a small but revealing instance of how the expedition policed the symbolic vocabulary of sovereignty among the Mandan and Hidatsa. Ordway, occupied with the boat, says nothing of the visit. Gass omits it entirely, perhaps because his retrospective account preferred the more vivid Sioux episode. The asymmetry reminds us that the enlisted journals, however valuable, rarely register the diplomatic transactions that most concerned the captains.
Patterns Across the Three
Three patterns emerge. First, Clark and Ordway share a same-day, observational discipline — measured snow, measured river drop — while Gass writes in retrospective paragraphs that bundle days together. Second, each narrator owns a domain: Clark the diplomatic, Ordway the logistical, Gass the anecdotal. Third, the silences are as informative as the entries. Ordway’s failure to mention Larocque, and Gass’s silence on both Larocque and the precise injured sergeant, demonstrate that no single Fort Mandan journal can stand alone. Cross-reading is not a luxury but a methodological necessity for the winter of 1804–05.
