The journal entries assigned to 23 November 1804 reveal one of the more instructive disjunctions in the expedition’s documentary record. Clark and Ordway, writing contemporaneously at the Mandan villages, describe a quiet day of labor at the new winter quarters. Gass’s entry, by contrast, recounts events plainly belonging to the descent of the Missouri among the Sioux — material that in his manuscript belongs to an earlier date but appears here in the published 1807 edition’s pagination. Read together, the three texts illuminate how differently each narrator constructed his daily record.
Clark and Ordway: The Labor of Settling In
By 23 November the Corps had been at the Mandan site for several weeks, and the journals of the two Missouri-bound writers focus on the practical demands of preparing for winter. Clark’s entry is brief and characteristically utilitarian, noting weather, wind, the dispatch of men for stone, and the health of the party:
23rd, a fair warm Day, wind from the S. E. Send after Stone Several men with bad Colds, one man Sheilds with the Rhumitism the river on a Stand haveing rose 4 Inches in all
Clark’s mention of John Shields suffering from rheumatism is the kind of personal detail his entries sometimes preserve where Ordway’s do not. He also tracks the Missouri’s level — a four-inch rise on an otherwise stationary river — a hydrological observation typical of his role as the expedition’s principal geographer.
Ordway’s entry for the same day dovetails neatly with Clark’s. Where Clark notes that men were sent for stone, Ordway records the parallel labor at the fort itself:
Stone. Rope works fixed. Several hands employed making a large Rope1 for the purpose of drawing the Barge up the Bank &.C.
The two entries function almost as complementary halves of the same report: Clark describes who was sent out, Ordway describes what was being built. The rope, intended to haul the keelboat up the bank as winter ice threatened, is the kind of concrete logistical detail Ordway often captures more clearly than the captains. His sergeant’s eye for the shop and the work crew supplements Clark’s command-level summary.
Gass: A Displaced Entry from the Sioux Country
Gass’s entry under this date stands apart from the other two in nearly every respect. He describes passing Elk Island, a creek named Smoke creek, and an evening encounter with Sioux men who swam across the river to the boat:
At six in the evening we saw four Indians on the south side and encamped on the north. Three of the Indians swam over to us : they belonged to the Sioux, and informed us that there were more of their nation not far distant.
This material describes country far downstream of the Mandan villages and an episode belonging to late September, when the expedition was negotiating its tense passage among the Teton Sioux. Its appearance under 23 November is a feature of the published 1807 text edited by David McKeehan from Gass’s original notes, in which dates and entries do not always align with the captains’ chronology. The discrepancy is a useful reminder that Gass’s journal as it survives is a literary artifact mediated by an editor, while Clark and Ordway’s entries are closer to their on-the-ground manuscripts.
Register, Detail, and the Shape of the Day
Even setting aside the chronological displacement, the three narrators differ sharply in register. Clark writes in clipped, abbreviated field prose — weather, wind, men, river. Ordway writes in slightly fuller sentences oriented toward task and tool. Gass, as rendered by McKeehan, writes in polished narrative paragraphs with named landmarks, numbered Indians, and a clear evening scene. The contrast underscores how much of what readers experience as Gass’s voice is in fact the smoothing hand of his publisher.
What Clark and Ordway both omit is any sense of the Mandan and Hidatsa world surrounding the fort — no mention of visitors, trade, or neighbors on a fair, warm day when such contact was routine. Their silence on this front is itself characteristic: when the work of construction dominated, the ethnographic record thinned. The day’s most enduring artifact, fittingly, is the great rope being twisted on the riverbank — a quiet preparation for the spring still months away.
