The journals attributed to 24 November 1804 reveal a striking divergence among the expedition’s narrators. William Clark and John Ordway each describe a quiet, productive day at the newly established Fort Mandan in present-day North Dakota. Patrick Gass’s published narrative, by contrast, recounts a tense encounter with Teton Sioux involving a stolen horse — an event that geographically and narratively belongs to the expedition’s passage up the Missouri weeks earlier. The juxtaposition offers a useful window into how the three sources differ in register, reliability of dating, and editorial mediation.
Clark and Ordway: The Fort Mandan Routine
Clark’s entry is brief and practical, the voice of a co-commander tracking labor, weather, and the health of his men. He notes the mild weather and a recurring concern of the winter encampment:
a warm Day Several men with bad Coalds we continue to Cover our Huts with hewed punchens, finishd. a Cord to draw our boat out on the bank, this is made 9 Straps of Elk Skin
Two construction details stand out. The party is roofing the huts with hewed punchens — split timbers dressed flat — and Clark records the completion of an elk-hide cord intended to haul the keelboat up onto the bank before the river froze solid. This is the language of an officer logging tasks completed.
Ordway, writing as a sergeant of the guard, captures the same day from a different angle. His concern is the daily roster and the steady traffic of Mandan and Hidatsa visitors:
as usal. the Guard reduced to a Sg* & 3 men. a nomber of the natives visits us everry day.
Ordway’s as usal is telling. By 24 November, the rhythm of garrison life had set in: a reduced guard of one sergeant and three men sufficed, and Indigenous visitors had become a constant, expected presence rather than an event worth describing. Where Clark documents materials and labor, Ordway documents personnel and social atmosphere. Together the two entries reconstruct a single day at the fort with very little overlap and almost no redundancy — a useful reminder that the sergeants’ journals are not simply echoes of the captains’ but independent records keyed to their authors’ responsibilities.
Gass’s Misaligned Entry
Gass’s entry, drawn from the 1807 published edition prepared by David McKeehan, describes events that cannot belong to 24 November 1804. He records an encounter with the Tinton or Teeton Band of Sioux at the mouth of the Teton River — a location far downstream of Fort Mandan, which the expedition had passed in late September:
We saw five Indians on the bank, but we could not understand each other. We cast anchor to wait for the periogues, one of which having came up, we went on to the mouth of the Tinton or Teeton river, where we anchored about 100 yards from the shore on the south side.
The episode of the stolen horse, the five Sioux who remained aboard overnight, and the French-speaking interpreter who could manage a little of the Sioux language all point to events from the Teton River council period. The footnote citing Alexander Mackenzie’s General History of the Fur Trade on the Knisteneaux confirms the editorial layering: McKeehan annotated and reorganized Gass’s field notes for publication, and the surviving printed text does not always preserve their original chronology.
For researchers, the lesson is methodological. Gass’s published journal remains a vital source — he often describes carpentry, hunting, and camp logistics that the captains omit — but its dates should be cross-checked against Clark, Ordway, Lewis, and Whitehouse before being treated as fixed.
Register and Readership
Even setting the chronology aside, the three voices differ in register. Clark writes telegraphically for himself and his co-commander. Ordway writes for the military record, abbreviating Sergeant and reporting the guard count. Gass — or rather Gass-as-edited-by-McKeehan — writes for a reading public, supplying ethnographic labels (Tinton or Teeton Band) and explanatory asides absent from the manuscript journals. Reading the three together on any given date is less about confirming a single account than about triangulating among distinct documentary genres produced by men with different audiences in mind.
