The expedition’s August 21, 1806 arrival at the Arikara villages produced three overlapping accounts that, read together, illuminate how the Corps’ narrators divided observational labor. Patrick Gass, John Ordway, and William Clark all describe the same sequence — meeting three Frenchmen ascending the Missouri, saluting the upper Arikara village, and conducting council with Arikara chiefs and visiting Cheyennes — but each narrator privileges different details, and the published Gass narrative carries an editorial intrusion absent from the manuscript journals.
The Three Frenchmen: Names, Numbers, and Detail
All three narrators record the encounter with French traders descending — or rather ascending — the river, but the precision varies sharply by rank. Gass writes only that the party
met three French-men in a canoe; one of them a young man, who formerly belonged to the North West Company of traders, wished to go with us to the United States.
Ordway names one — “one by the name of Revey” — and supplies their itinerary: trapping as high as the Yellowstone (“river Roshjone”), poor returns, currently residing among the Arikaras, bound for the Mandans to retrieve traps before descending to St. Louis. Clark, writing as commanding officer, supplies the fullest identification:
they proved to be three men from the Ricaras two of them Reevea & Greinyea wintered with us at the mandans in 1804.
Only Clark recognizes the men personally — Rivet and Grenier had wintered with the Corps at Fort Mandan — and only Clark records the diplomatic transaction that followed: “those men had nether powder nor lead we gave them a horn of powder and Some balls.” The detail is characteristic. Clark consistently logs material exchanges that Gass and Ordway omit or compress.
The Sioux War Party: A Number That Shifts
A striking discrepancy emerges in the intelligence the Frenchmen pass along about a Sioux war party moving against the Mandans and Hidatsas. Ordway writes that “15 hundred of the Souix nation had gone up to war with the Mandans.” Clark, recording the same conversation, gives the figure as “700 Seeoux” and adds geographic specificity Ordway lacks: “their encampment where the Squaws and Children wer, was Some place near the Big Bend of this river below.” Gass omits the war party entirely. Whether Ordway misheard, inflated, or recorded a different speaker’s estimate cannot be resolved, but the doubling of the number is exactly the kind of variance that makes cross-narrator collation valuable — neither figure should be cited without the other.
The Refused Medal and an Editor’s Footnote
The most revealing divergence concerns the Cheyenne chief’s reception of Clark’s medal. Ordway reports the gift and counter-gift matter-of-factly: “our officers gave a principal man of the chien nation a meddle, he gave in return Some fat dryed buffaloe meat.” He notes the Cheyennes’ wariness — “they are afraid of the white people and of any thing they have for they think it to be great medicin” — but offers no judgment.
Gass’s published account is sharper. The chief, he writes, initially returned the medal,
and said he was afraid of white people, and did not like to take any thing from them; but after some persuasion he accepted the medal.
Gass — or more likely his editor, David McKeehan — labels the Cheyennes “a very silly superstitious people.” An asterisked footnote then turns the judgment on its head:
We think that some further proof is necessary to establish the weakness and superstition of these Indians. Had the chief persevered in his rejection of the medal, we, instead of thinking him silly and superstitious, would have been inclined to the opinion, that he was the wisest Indian on the Missouri.
This editorial voice — almost certainly McKeehan’s — is unique to the Gass volume and demonstrates how the published narrative differs in register from the manuscript field journals. Neither Ordway nor Clark editorializes on the chief’s reluctance; Clark merely notes that the Arikaras and Cheyennes “appeared anxious to take us by the hand.”
What Each Narrator Sees
Clark, conducting the council, gives the diplomatic protocol in detail: the salute of four guns, the answering volley from the village, the recognition of the two chiefs medaled in 1804, the smoke of Mandan tobacco furnished by Sheheke (“the Big white Chief”), the formal circle of Arikara and Cheyenne leaders. Ordway, second in observational rank, captures the trade dynamics — Cheyennes exchanging buffalo meat and robes for Arikara corn — and the Corps’ own bartering for “Robes & Mockasons.” Gass compresses the council into a single sentence and moves on.
Together the three entries reconstruct a fuller scene than any one provides: Clark for diplomacy and identification, Ordway for trade and numbers, Gass (through McKeehan) for the moralizing frame in which the expedition would be presented to American readers.
