The arrival of North West Company traders at Fort Mandan on December 16, 1804 occasioned three quite different journal entries. The visit was diplomatically significant — British fur traders were sounding out American intentions in territory newly acquired through the Louisiana Purchase — but only one of the three narrators present grasps that significance in full. Comparing the accounts of William Clark, Patrick Gass, and John Ordway exposes a hierarchy of information access within the Corps of Discovery, and demonstrates how each man’s station shaped what he thought worth recording.
Clark’s Diplomatic Register
Clark, as co-commander, receives the visitors formally and records their identities with care. He names Mr. Henny as the courier from the Assiniboine River post, names the letter’s author — Charles Chaboillez — and identifies the two clerks who accompanied Henny: Mr. Larocque of the North West Company and Mr. George Bunch of the Hudson’s Bay Company. He frames Chaboillez’s letter in the language of diplomatic courtesy:
Mr. C in his letters expressed a great anxiety to Serve us in any thing in his power
Clark also opens with a striking meteorological note — the thermometer at twenty-two below zero, and a halo around the moon seen through the frosty air — and tucks in a curious medical detail: a root described by Mr. Henny as a cure for the bite of a mad dog. The entry is thus simultaneously diplomatic, scientific, and ethnographic, which is characteristic of Clark’s command-level register.
Gass’s Interpretive Frame
Gass, a sergeant, was not present at the officers’ meeting and so records the event at one remove. He miscounts the visitors — he says three traders came, where Clark’s more authoritative entry names three companions arriving with Henny, making four men in the party — and Ordway likewise reports four. More importantly, Gass supplies an interpretive gloss that neither Clark nor Ordway offers:
The object of the visits we received from the N. W. Company, was to ascertain our motives for visiting that country, and to gain information with respect to the change of government.
This is a shrewd reading of British intentions, and it is the only place in the day’s three entries where the geopolitical stakes are made explicit. Gass — or, more likely, the editor who later prepared his journal for publication in 1807 — also appends a substantial footnote tracing the founding of the North West Company in 1783–84 and surveying its trading establishments from Hudson’s Bay to the Rockies. The footnote is clearly editorial accretion rather than field observation, but it indicates that contemporary readers needed the context Gass’s terse entry presumed.
Ordway’s Ground-Level View
Ordway, also a sergeant, records the visit from the perspective of the rank and file. He notices what Clark and Gass omit: the traders came to do business with the Mandans and Hidatsas (“Grovantiars”), not principally with the Americans, and the enlisted men took the opportunity to acquire something they badly wanted.
Some of our men got some Tobacco from them, they remained with [us] all night.
Where Clark sees a diplomatic exchange and Gass sees an intelligence-gathering mission, Ordway sees a tobacco resupply. He names no one — not Henny, not Chaboillez, not Larocque, not Bunch — and records no letter. His entry is the shortest of the three and the most concrete about the visitors’ commercial purpose among the surrounding villages.
Cross-Narrator Patterns
Three features emerge from the comparison. First, only Clark has access to the names and the correspondence; the sergeants’ entries cannot have been copied from his, and the three accounts appear genuinely independent. Second, the headcount discrepancy — Gass’s three versus Ordway’s four versus Clark’s implicit four — is typical of the journals’ minor numerical drift on days when not every narrator witnessed the event firsthand. Third, the register differences are sharply diagnostic: Clark records diplomacy and natural history, Gass supplies analytical framing (with later editorial expansion), and Ordway reports what the men got out of the day. Read together, the three entries reconstruct the visit more fully than any one of them does alone, and they illustrate why the multi-narrator structure of the expedition’s journal-keeping has proven so valuable to historians of the fur trade frontier.
