The entries dated 6 December 1804 present one of the more revealing puzzles in the expedition’s documentary record. Three men — William Clark, John Ordway, and Patrick Gass — were all encamped at the newly established Fort Mandan in present-day North Dakota, yet their journal entries for this single date diverge so sharply in subject, length, and even apparent location that they invite close comparison.
Clark’s Ethnographic Eye
Clark produces by far the fullest entry. He opens with weather observations precise enough to include a thermometer reading:
The wind blew violently hard from the N, N W. with Some Snow the air Keen and Cold. The Thermometer at 8 oClock A, M, Stood at 10 dgs. above o
What follows is characteristic of Clark’s growing role as the expedition’s ethnographer. When a Mandan man and his wife arrive bringing meat for the interpreter — almost certainly Toussaint Charbonneau — Clark records the visitor’s clothing with the careful inventory of someone who knows such details will matter:
his dress was a par mockersons of Buffalow Skin Pr. Legins of Goat Skin & a Buffalow robe, 14 ring of Brass on his fingers, this metel the Mandans ar verry fond off
The observation about brass — “this metel the Mandans ar verry fond off” — is the kind of trade-relevant note that would inform later commercial relations. Clark closes with a river-rise measurement of one and a half inches, demonstrating that even in bitter cold the daily scientific protocols continued.
Ordway’s Terseness, Gass’s Apparent Displacement
Ordway’s entry is a single sentence:
Snow & wind high it being so disagreeable weather that we delayed on the work.
As a sergeant overseeing labor details on the unfinished fort, Ordway records what mattered to his duties: construction had stopped. His silence on the Mandan visitor and on the temperature reading suggests that the captains’ scientific and diplomatic observations were not consistently shared down the chain of journalists. Ordway writes from inside the work crew’s experience — cold, wind, lost time.
The most striking entry, however, is Gass’s:
clear day; passed bluffs on the south side and a bottom covered with timber on the north. About 11 we passed a handsome bottom, where a band of the Rees lived last winter. They had left a number of round huts covered with earth, some of their water craft made of buffaloe hides, and some garden truck, such as squashes.
Gass describes a clear day of travel, passing abandoned Arikara (“Rees”) earth lodges and bullboats, and encamping on a sand beach. None of this matches 6 December 1804, when the expedition was stationary at Fort Mandan in subzero weather. The passage instead resembles an October description from the journey upriver past the abandoned Arikara villages near the Grand River. The discrepancy almost certainly reflects the editorial history of Gass’s journal: his original manuscript was lost, and the published 1807 version was rewritten by David McKeehan from Gass’s notes. Misalignments of date and entry are a known artifact of that process. The entry remains valuable evidence — but for a different day’s travel than its heading claims.
What the Three Entries Reveal Together
Read side by side, the three accounts illustrate the stratified nature of the expedition’s documentary record. Clark, as co-commander, writes for posterity and for Jefferson: weather instruments, river measurements, ethnographic observation of dress and material culture. Ordway, the senior sergeant, writes operationally — what the men did or could not do. Gass, or rather the Gass-McKeehan text, presents a narrative shaped after the fact for a reading public, and is consequently the least reliable as a daily record though often the most readable.
The 6 December entries also expose what each narrator misses. Ordway omits the Mandan visitor entirely, even though such a visit to the interpreter’s quarters would have been visible within the small fort. Clark, focused on the visitor and the instruments, says nothing about whether construction halted — a fact Ordway alone preserves. Only by reading the three together does the day come into focus: a bitterly cold morning at ten degrees above zero, work suspended on the unfinished fort, and a Mandan couple arriving with meat, the husband’s brass rings catching Clark’s careful eye.
