The journals dated December 5, 1804 offer an instructive case in the heterogeneity of expedition record-keeping. Three narrators — William Clark, John Ordway, and Patrick Gass — each commit pen to paper, yet their entries scarcely overlap in subject matter. Read together, they reveal not contradiction but specialization: each writer attends to the slice of garrison life nearest his role and rank.
Clark the Diplomat-Observer
Clark’s entry is the most temporally specific to December 5 itself. He opens with weather, as is his habit, noting a “Cold raw morning wind from the S. E.” with intermittent snow. He then turns to the matter that clearly preoccupies him: the comings and goings of rival traders and Indigenous visitors at the newly established Fort Mandan.
two of the N W. Companey Came to See us, to let us Know they intended to Set out for the establishment on the osinniboin River in two Days-& their party would Consist of 5 men, Several Indians also visited us one brought Pumpkins or Simmins as a preasent
Clark’s gaze is outward and political. He logs the strength of the North West Company party (five men), their destination (the Assiniboine post), and the courteous gift of pumpkins — “Simmins” being his phonetic rendering of a regional term. The shift of wind to the northeast by evening closes the entry. This is the journal of a co-commander tracking intelligence, allies, and meteorology.
Ordway the Sergeant of Works
Ordway’s entry is the briefest of the three and the most narrowly utilitarian:
we continued the work as usal. we layed a platform upon the meat & Smoak house for a Sentnel to walk.
As a sergeant responsible for the daily detail of the corps, Ordway records what Clark omits entirely: the actual labor of building the winter quarters. The detail of a sentinel’s platform atop the meat-and-smoke house is the kind of practical fortification note that would be invisible from the captains’ vantage but essential to garrison routine. Where Clark sees diplomats arriving at a fort, Ordway sees a fort still being built around them. Neither narrator mentions the other’s subject.
Gass and the Problem of Date
Gass’s entry presents an immediate puzzle for the cross-narrator reader. He describes a temperate, active day on the river:
About 1 1 we saw some goats swimming the river, when one of our hunters ran up the shore and killed four of them, and we took them into the boat and periogues as they floated down.
He continues with passages by “Hidden creek” and “White Goat creek,” with the party encamping on the north side. None of this matches December 5 at Fort Mandan, where the corps had been stationary for weeks and the river was freezing. The geography — high black bluffs, pronghorn (“goats”) swimming a still-open river — places the event in present-day South Dakota during the upriver journey of mid-September 1804. Gass’s published journal, heavily edited by David McKeehan from Gass’s manuscript notes, is well known to suffer from such date dislocations and editorial interpolations. The entry is a useful reminder that printed expedition narratives are not always synchronous with the dates assigned to them.
What the Three Together Reveal
Taken as a set, the December 5 entries demonstrate how thinly any single narrator covers the day. Without Ordway, the construction of the sentinel platform vanishes from the historical record. Without Clark, the visit of the North West Company traders and the Mandan gift of pumpkins goes unrecorded. And Gass’s misplaced hunting vignette, while not properly belonging to this date at all, illustrates the editorial layer that separates manuscript field notes from published journal — a layer scholars must continually peel back. The register differs accordingly: Clark writes as a commander logging contacts, Ordway as a non-commissioned officer logging tasks, and Gass (through McKeehan) as a narrator shaped for a reading public. The day at Fort Mandan exists only in the composite.
