The entries of November 27, 1804 offer an unusually rich opportunity for cross-narrator comparison. Clark, Gass, and Ordway all describe the same day at Fort Mandan, but each filters the events through a distinct vantage: Clark the commanding diplomat, Gass the curious ethnographic observer, and Ordway the brisk camp chronicler. Read together, the three accounts reconstruct a layered scene of construction work completed, suspicions defused, and a long night of dancing that ended with the boat adrift.
Diplomatic Stakes: Clark’s Command Perspective
Clark’s entry is by far the most politically detailed. Where Ordway notes only that the Hidatsa (“Grovantaur”) chiefs “apper to be verry friendly” and had stayed away because “the Manden nation told them that we we would do them harm,” Clark unpacks the rumor in full. He names the visiting chiefs — Mar-noh-toh and Man-nes-sur-ree — and explains the Mandan claim:
The Menitares, (or Big bellies) were allarmed at the tales told them by the Mandans Viz: that we intended to join the Seaux to Cut off them in the Course of the winter, many Circumstances Combind to give force to those reports i e the movements of the interpeters & their families to the Fort, the strength of our work &.
Clark alone records the snub from the principal chief Mar-par-pa-par-ra-pas-a-too (“Horned Weasel”), who “did not Chuse to be Seen” and sent word that he was not at home. Clark also documents a parallel diplomatic flare-up with the seven North West Company traders newly arrived from the Assiniboine, naming Laroque, McKenzie, and the interpreter Lafrance, whom Clark warned about “unfavourable & ill founded assursions.” None of this appears in Gass or Ordway — a reminder that the captains’ journals carry the institutional memory of inter-imperial negotiation that the enlisted men either did not witness or did not consider their business to record.
Ethnography from the Ranks: Gass at the Village
Gass, the carpenter-sergeant, produces the most ethnographically textured account of the day. While Clark stays at the fort receiving chiefs, Gass crosses to the Indian camp himself and counts “about eighty” lodges of “about ten persons each.” His description of domestic life is the kind of detail Clark omits entirely:
The women were employed in dressing buffaloe skins, for clothing for themselves and for covering their lodges. They are the most friendly people I ever saw; but will pilfer if they have an opportunity. They are also very dirty: the water they make use of, is carried in the paunches of the animals they kill, just as they are emptied, without being cleaned.
Gass also supplies the only account of the Hidatsa victory dance in any depth, describing the orchestra of “about twelve persons beating on a buffaloe hide,” the column of roughly eighty women circling the fire “with sticks in their hands, and the scalps of the Mahas they had killed, tied on them,” and the recent battle in which the Hidatsa took seventy-five Omaha lives and twenty-five women prisoners. Gass alone reports the chiefs’ promise to Lewis that the prisoners would be returned and peace made — a diplomatic outcome Clark does not mention, perhaps because Lewis would report it directly.
The Lost Anchor and the Dancer on His Head
The three accounts diverge most strikingly on the evening’s mishaps. Ordway compresses the night into a single vivid image: “we had a dance this evening. Rivet dances on his head &C.” — the French engagé François Rivet’s headstand, a detail Clark and Gass both omit. Gass, by contrast, gives the only account of the broken cable:
On coming aboard, the periogue run across the bow of the boat and broke the cable. All hands were roused to row the boat ashore; the chiefs called aloud, and a number of the warriors came to our assistance… This unfortunate accident lost to us our anchor.
Clark, who would surely have known of the lost anchor, says nothing of it here, registering instead that “The two Chiefs much pleased with their treatments & the Cherefullness of the party, who Danced to amuse them.” He closes with a private note absent from the other journals — “Some miss understanding with Jussomm & his woman” — that hints at domestic friction inside the fort he was responsible for managing.
Taken together, the entries demonstrate a consistent division of narrative labor at Fort Mandan: Clark tracks chiefs, traders, and rumors; Gass observes lodges, foodways, and the mechanics of an accident; Ordway condenses the day into the briefest serviceable record, brightened by a single performer’s flourish. No one narrator captured November 27 whole — only the three together do.
