The entries dated 21 November 1804 from Fort Mandan present a striking puzzle for readers of the expedition journals. Two of the three narrators — William Clark and John Ordway — describe the same small domestic operation: dispatching a pirogue downriver to gather stone for the backs of the chimneys then under construction at the new winter quarters. Patrick Gass, by contrast, writes about bluffs, bottoms, and a creek encampment that bear no resemblance to the stationary fort. The divergence offers a useful case study in how the expedition’s journalists handled chronology, copying, and the question of what constituted a day’s news.
Clark and Ordway: Parallel Accounts of a Quiet Workday
Clark’s entry is the fullest of the three and reads as a captain’s daily log — weather, labor, visitors, river conditions, and the morale of the party are each given a phrase. He records a “fine Day,” notes that he “dispatched a perogu and Collected Stone for our Chimnys,” and adds that the men were “arrange[ing] our different articles.” The day is marked further by the visit of “maney Indians,” by a minor injury to a member of the party, and by the state of the Missouri itself:
The river Clear of ice, & riseing a little
Ordway’s entry covers the same chimney-stone errand in a single compressed sentence:
Sent a Short distance down the River for Stone for the Back of our chimneys 4 backs made &.C.
The overlap between the two captains’ sergeants and the captain himself is unsurprising — Ordway, as orderly sergeant, often shadowed Clark’s daily concerns — but the specificity differs in revealing ways. Ordway alone supplies the production figure (“4 backs made”), the kind of quartermaster detail he frequently registers when Clark records only the activity in general. Clark, for his part, situates the labor inside a broader social and environmental frame: weather, Indian visitors, the injured hand of “G D” (George Drouillard or George Drewyer, depending on the editor), the rising river. Read together, the two entries reconstruct a fuller picture of the day at Fort Mandan than either provides alone.
Gass and the Problem of the Misaligned Entry
Gass’s entry is the anomaly. He writes of proceeding “four miles along bluffs on the south side,” of reaching “the termination of the Grand bend,” of passing “a creek on the south side, called Tyler’s creek,” and of encamping on the north bank. None of this fits Fort Mandan in late November, where the party had already been encamped for weeks and where construction — not travel — defined the daily routine. The terrain Gass describes belongs to the Missouri well downstream, and the reference to the Grand Bend and Tyler’s Creek points to country the expedition traversed in September.
The likeliest explanation is editorial rather than evidentiary. Gass’s published journal of 1807 was extensively reworked by David McKeehan from the sergeant’s original notebooks, and the surviving printed text occasionally misaligns dates, especially during the Fort Mandan winter when the original Gass manuscript ran thin. What appears under “21 November” in the Gass volume is, in all probability, a passage belonging to an earlier moving day, displaced in the process of preparation for the press. Readers approaching Gass through the printed edition should treat his datelines during the winter months with caution and triangulate against Clark and Ordway whenever possible.
Register, Audience, and the Shape of a Day
Even setting the Gass anomaly aside, the contrast in register between Clark and Ordway is instructive. Clark writes for himself and for the expedition’s official record; his sentences accumulate observations across categories, and he closes with a morale note — “all the party in high Spirits” — that has no counterpart in Ordway. Ordway writes shorter, more task-oriented entries that read like work tickets: what was sent, how far, how many produced. Where Clark frames the day, Ordway tallies it.
The chimney-stone errand itself is a small thing, but it marks an important moment in the Fort Mandan timeline: the huts were rising, the chimneys were being faced for the long winter ahead, and the Missouri — by Clark’s testimony — was still open water. Within a few weeks the river would lock in ice, and the rhythms of the journals would shift accordingly.
