The journal entries assigned to November 10, 1804, present an unusual editorial puzzle for readers of the Lewis and Clark corpus. Two of the three narrators — John Ordway and William Clark — describe the same scene at the rising Fort Mandan: construction of huts, the visit of a Mandan chief, and the curious crossing of the Missouri in a bullboat. The third narrator, Patrick Gass, as preserved in the 1807 published edition, records an entirely different landscape: sulphur bluffs, a petrified fish skeleton, and elk swimming the river — events that belong to the outbound journey months earlier. Reading the three side by side reveals both the daily texture of life at the new winter quarters and the editorial layering that shaped Gass’s printed narrative.
Ordway and Clark: Converging Eyes on Fort Mandan
Ordway and Clark, writing on the same day in the same place, produce accounts that overlap closely in subject while diverging in emphasis. Ordway, the orderly sergeant, focuses on labor and materials. He reports that the men
finished raiseing one line of our huts, commenced hughing & Guttering the the puncheen for the purpose of covering the huts.
His vocabulary is that of a working carpenter — “puncheen” (puncheons, split-log slabs), “hughing,” “Guttering” — and his interest in the visiting Indian centers on what was carried: a buffalo-hide canoe and “Som fat buffalow meat.”
Clark, the captain, sees the same arrival but frames it as diplomacy. He names the visitor — “a Chief Half Partia” — and notes the reciprocal exchange:
brought a Side of a Buffalow, in return We Gave Some fiew small things to himself & wife & Son.
Where Ordway sees provisions, Clark sees a gift economy and a family unit. Clark also alone preserves the small ethnographic detail of how the party departed: the chief recrossed in the bullboat while “the Squar took the Boat and proceeded on to the Town 3 miles.” Neither Ordway nor Gass records this domestic division of transport. Clark closes with a weather and migration note — “the Day raw and Cold wind from the N W, the Gees Continue to pass in gangues as also brant to the South” — registering the seasonal pressure that made the hut-raising urgent. Ordway omits weather entirely; for him the day is defined by carpentry.
Gass’s Displaced Entry and the Problem of Editorial Reconstruction
The Gass entry assigned to this date in the 1807 McKeehan edition does not describe Fort Mandan at all. It describes
black sulphur bluffs on the south side. On the top of these bluffs we found the skeleton or back bones of a fish, 45 feet long, and petrified : part of these bones were sent to the city of Washington.
This is the celebrated fossil discovery — almost certainly the plesiosaur-like vertebrae found near the mouth of the Niobrara region during the upriver passage in late summer 1804, not at the Mandan villages in November. The reference to bones “sent to the city of Washington” is itself a retrospective insertion, since no shipment occurred until the spring 1805 keelboat return. Gass’s original field notebook is lost; the printed text was reworked by his editor David McKeehan, who appears to have arranged surviving fragments into a continuous narrative without strict regard to dating.
The contrast with Ordway and Clark is therefore methodologically instructive. Where the two field journals agree on the small particulars of November 10 — the half-buffalo, the hide canoe, the unfinished line of huts — Gass’s printed page reminds readers that the published expedition record is a composite, shaped by post-expedition editing as much as by daily observation.
Patterns of Attention
Across the two reliable Fort Mandan entries, a consistent division of labor emerges. Ordway documents the fort’s progress in the technical register of a sergeant accountable to his officers. Clark documents Indian relations in the register of a commander cultivating alliances for the coming winter. Their accounts are not redundant but complementary: together they show a single afternoon in which carpentry and diplomacy proceeded simultaneously, the hut walls rising while a chief’s family was ferried across the Missouri in a skin boat. Gass’s misplaced fossil, meanwhile, stands as a useful caution — the expedition’s printed memory is not always synchronous with its lived day.
