The journal entries dated 28 November 1804 offer a striking case study in how the Lewis and Clark narratives diverge — not only in detail and register, but occasionally in chronology itself. While William Clark and John Ordway record the snowy stillness of an early winter day at Fort Mandan, Patrick Gass’s published journal for this date describes a scene of riverine departure that cannot have occurred at the newly built winter quarters. Read together, the three accounts illuminate the different editorial fates of the expedition’s records.
Clark and Ordway: A Snowbound Day at the Fort
Clark and Ordway agree on the essentials. Both note the morning’s snowfall, the northerly wind, and the falling river. Ordway’s terse entry observes:
Snow this morning, the wind from N.E. the River falling. Gealousy between Mr Gi[b]son one of our intr and George Drewyer last evening. &.C.
Ordway’s interest in interpersonal friction — here a quarrel between the interpreter Gibson and George Drouillard — is characteristic of his sergeant’s-eye-view, attentive to the social fabric of the corps in ways the captains seldom record. Clark, by contrast, gives the day’s diplomatic substance. The Mandan chief Black Cat (Posecopsahe) visits the fort, and Clark uses the occasion to press a sovereignty claim:
at parting we had Some little talk on the Subject of the British Trader Mr. Le rock Giveing Meadils & Flags, and told those Chiefs to impress it on the minds of their nations that those Simbells were not to be recved by any from them, without they wished incur the displieasure of their Great American Father
This passage references François-Antoine Larocque of the North West Company, whose presence among the Mandan and Hidatsa villages alarmed the captains throughout the winter. Clark’s gifts — handkerchiefs, armbands, paint, and a twist of tobacco — are paired with an explicit prohibition: accepting British medals or flags will be read as a hostile act. Ordway, who likely was not in the council, makes no mention of the visit. The two entries thus complement rather than duplicate one another: Ordway watches the men, Clark watches the chiefs.
Clark closes the entry with the weary judgment, “a verry disagreeable day — no work done to day,” and a precise measurement: “river fall 1 Inch to day.” The cold and snow that Ordway records meteorologically, Clark records as a brake on the fort’s construction labor.
The Gass Anomaly
Gass’s entry under this date presents a puzzle. He describes weighing anchor, a confrontation with Indians who seize the cordelle, Lewis nearly ordering the rope cut and fire returned, the gift of a carrot of tobacco, and the pursuit by an Indian bearing news of three hundred more arrivals at camp. None of this fits Fort Mandan in late November, where the keelboat sat frozen in and the corps was building huts. The scene instead resembles events from the Teton Sioux encounter on the Missouri in late September 1804.
The discrepancy is almost certainly editorial. Gass’s original field notes were heavily reworked by David McKeehan for the 1807 Pittsburgh edition, and the printed text occasionally misorders or conflates entries. The interpolated footnote — invoking Alexander Mackenzie on the Sioux war party and the arrow-pierced rock near Lake Superior — is McKeehan’s gloss, not Gass’s observation, and its lurid framing of the Sioux as a “ferocious, blood-thirsty race” reflects the editor’s voice more than the carpenter-sergeant’s.
The ethnographic passage on the dog travois, however, likely does descend from Gass’s own notes:
they yoked a dog to a kind of car, which they have to haul their baggage from one camp to another ; the nation having no settled place or village, but are always moving about. The dogs are not large, much resemble a wolf, and will haul about 70 pounds each.
Gass consistently records material culture and working details — load weights, construction methods, animal handling — that the captains tend to pass over. The seventy-pound figure is the kind of practical estimate one expects from a man who built the fort’s huts.
Register and Reliability
Taken together, the three accounts demonstrate the layered nature of the expedition’s textual record. Clark’s field journal preserves the day’s diplomacy in his idiosyncratic orthography. Ordway’s terse log captures weather and quarrels with equal economy. Gass’s published journal, mediated by McKeehan, must be read with awareness that its dates and editorial asides cannot always be trusted at face value. For 28 November 1804, it is Clark and Ordway who anchor the historical day; Gass’s page belongs, in spirit if not in print, to an earlier stretch of river.
