The journal entries dated November 8, 1804 expose how thoroughly the labor of recording the expedition was distributed across temperaments and stations. William Clark, John Ordway, and Patrick Gass each set down what they considered worth preserving from the same day at the nascent Fort Mandan, and the three accounts scarcely overlap. Read together, they form a composite portrait that no single narrator supplies.
Clark’s Diplomatic Eye
Clark’s entry is characteristically terse and oriented toward command-level intelligence. He notes the weather, the construction progress (“we Contd. to build our huts”), and the social traffic of Mandans bringing horses to graze near the camp. But the substantive content is geopolitical:
Jussome our interpreter went to the Village, on his return he informed us that three English men had arrived from the Hudsons Bay Company, and would be here tomorrow
This is the kind of information a co-captain records: the imminent arrival of agents from a rival imperial trading concern, mediated through the interpreter René Jusseaume. Neither Gass nor Ordway mentions the Hudson’s Bay men at all on this date, though Gass does indirectly corroborate the British commercial presence on the upper Missouri by relaying that Lewis, while hunting, “passed a trading house, built in 1796.” The two notices — one a future arrival, the other a past structure — bracket the Anglo-Canadian fur trade that the expedition was navigating, but only Gass and Clark register it, and they do so from entirely different angles.
Ordway and the Cottonwood Problem
Ordway’s fragment for the day is wholly practical, focused on the unglamorous question of whether local timber will yield usable roofing:
we found that the C. W. [cottonwood] will rive well So that we are in hopes to make enofe to cover our buildings, but afterwards found it difficult and Gave up the Idea.
The sentence even reverses itself mid-stride — initial optimism that cottonwood would split (“rive”) cleanly enough for shingles or covering, followed by the disappointed admission that the experiment failed. Ordway, as sergeant, attends to what Clark only summarizes as “we Contd. to build our huts.” Where Clark gives the headline, Ordway gives the workshop notes. The register difference is sharp: Clark’s prose is administrative; Ordway’s is tradesman’s reportage, including the abandoned plan that a more polished narrator might have edited out.
Gass and the Narrative Instinct
Gass, by contrast, is the storyteller of the trio. His November 8 entry — written from a position evidently still upriver or in the field rather than at the fort proper — is the longest and the most anecdotally rich. He describes weather and terrain (“high bluffs on the south side and burnt prairie on the north”), tallies game (“two buffaloe, a large and a small elk, a deer and two beaver”), and offers a small drama:
At 9 I went out with one of our men, who had killed a buffaloe and left his hat to keep off the vermin and beasts of prey ; but when we came to the place, we found the wolves had devoured the carcase and carried off the hat. Here we found a white wolf dead, supposed to have been killed in a contest for the buffaloe.
The vignette is the sort of detail neither captain bothers to record: a folk method of carcass protection (leaving a hat as a human-scent deterrent), its failure, and the forensic inference of a wolf-on-wolf fight over the spoils. Gass also preserves a movement of Lewis’s that goes unmentioned by Clark — “Captain Lewis who had been out with some of the men hunting informed us he had passed a trading house, built in 1796” — confirming that the captains were operating on partly separate tracks this day.
It is worth noting that Gass’s published journal was edited by David McKeehan in 1807 and is therefore stylistically smoother than Ordway’s or Clark’s manuscripts; the polish should not be mistaken for greater fidelity. Still, the substantive observations — the hat, the dead white wolf, the 1796 trading house — appear nowhere else in the day’s record. Without Gass, the encounter with the wolves vanishes; without Clark, the Hudson’s Bay news vanishes; without Ordway, the cottonwood failure vanishes. The November 8 entries are a useful reminder that the “Lewis and Clark journals” are in fact a chorus, and that any single voice, read alone, leaves the day half-told.
