The entries of August 15, 1806, written near the Mandan villages on the return journey, reveal a stark divergence in narrative scope. William Clark devotes nearly his entire entry to a single diplomatic encounter — his attempt to persuade a Mandan or Hidatsa chief to descend the Missouri with the Corps to meet Thomas Jefferson. Patrick Gass and John Ordway, by contrast, summarize the same effort in a sentence or two, attending instead to the practical textures of a camp held in suspension while the captains conducted their councils.
Clark’s Council and the Shadow of the Sioux
Clark’s entry preserves something rare in the journals: a sustained, near-verbatim record of Indigenous political reasoning. He reminds the assembled chiefs of promises made in 1804, urging them to visit “their great father the president of the U. States” at government expense. The response from the principal Hidatsa (Menetara) chief is uncompromising:
he Said he wished to go down and See his great father very much, but that the Scioux were in the road and would most certainly kill him or any others who Should go down they were bad people and would not listen to any thing which was told them. when he Saw us last we told him that we had made peace with all the nations below, Since that time the Seioux had killed 8 of their people and Stole a number of their horses.
The chief’s accounting is precise and damning: eight dead, horses stolen, a peace that did not hold. He had “opened his ears and followed our Councils,” making peace with the Cheyennes and the “rocky mountains indians,” but the promised security to the south had failed. Clark records the rebuke without rebuttal. He then crosses the river to Black Cat’s village on the north side, where the same answer is delivered more quietly over a smoke and a pile of roughly twelve bushels of corn. Only at the entry’s close does a single “young man” offer to go — a detail Clark leaves dangling, its resolution deferred.
Gass and Ordway: The Camp Around the Council
Gass compresses the same day into a few lines, but his framing is structurally revealing. He understands the delay as a procedural matter: “They had to hold councils among themselves, and we had to wait for their answers.” Where Clark dramatizes the persuasion, Gass acknowledges that the Mandan and Hidatsa decision-making process is itself a deliberative institution requiring its own time. Gass then pivots to a piece of news Clark omits entirely — that the two hunters left upriver had returned, and that one of the enlisted party was being released to join them in a private trapping partnership up the Missouri and the Yellowstone (“Jaune”).
Ordway covers ground neither captain records. He notes the men “dressing themselves deer Skins,” the breakfast of “boild siniblins & beans” brought by the Mandans, and the generosity of the second village, which gave “more than we would take away.” Ordway also captures a detail of substantial diplomatic weight that Clark passes over: “we gave the Swivvel to the Big Belleys or Grousevauntars.” The transfer of the swivel gun to the Hidatsa — a parting gift of considerable martial and symbolic value — is recorded by the sergeant, not the captain. Ordway likewise confirms that the first village asked the party to remain another day or two, suggesting that the councils Clark describes were embedded in a broader negotiation over the expedition’s departure.
Register and Omission
The three narrators’ registers diverge sharply. Clark writes in the formal voice of an officer compiling a diplomatic record; his entry could be transposed almost intact into an official report to the Secretary of War. Gass writes as a sergeant tracking personnel and logistics — note his attention to the hunter’s release, a matter of muster and accountability. Ordway, also a sergeant, writes closest to the texture of camp sociability: food, hide-dressing, the small economies of corn exchanged between peoples.
Read together, the entries expose what each narrator considers worth preserving. Clark records the failure of American diplomacy among the Upper Missouri nations and the precise Indigenous critique of that failure. Gass and Ordway record what Clark, absorbed in the council lodges, did not see: the swivel gun changing hands, the squash and beans on the fire, a man leaving the party to trap furs in country the expedition was finally quitting.
