The entries for October 22, 1804, offer a useful case study in how three expedition narrators — William Clark, John Ordway, and Patrick Gass — could witness the same event yet preserve it for radically different purposes. All three men encamped that night on the same bank of the Missouri, having met the same band of Sioux earlier in the day. Their journals, read together, reveal the layered nature of the expedition’s documentary record.
One Encounter, Three Registers
The central event of the day is the meeting with a small Sioux party traveling on foot down the river. Clark, the senior officer present and the man responsible for diplomatic judgment, treats the encounter with suspicion. He identifies the band specifically as Tetons, counts twelve men, and reads their condition as militarily significant:
we Came too at a Camp of Teton Seaux on the L. S. those people 12 in number were naikd and had the appearanc of war, we have every reason to believ that they are going or have been to Steel horses from the Mandins, they tell two Stories, we gave them nothing
Gass, writing for what would become the first published account of the expedition, records the same encounter in a single sentence stripped of inference:
At 9 we saw 11 Indians of the Sioux nation coming down from the Mandans, who, notwithstanding the coldness of the weather, had not an article of clothing except their breech-clouts.
Where Clark sees a war party telling “two Stories,” Gass sees only cold men in breech-clouts. He even differs on the count — eleven rather than twelve — and identifies the band only by the broader nation rather than the Teton subdivision. Ordway, the orderly sergeant, splits the difference: he names the tribe as “yankton” rather than Teton, notes that the men “Sd they were on their way down the River,” and records that the party “Gave them Some meat and proceeded on.” The three narrators thus disagree not only on tone but on basic ethnographic and numerical facts — the kind of discrepancy that recurs throughout the journals whenever an encounter was brief and the captains had to rely on signs.
What Each Narrator Notices
Beyond the Sioux meeting, the entries diverge according to each writer’s habitual concerns. Clark, despite — or perhaps because of — being incapacitated, produces by far the longest entry. He opens with a strikingly personal medical note:
last night at 1 oClock I was violently and Suddinly attacked with the Rhumitism in the neck which was So violent I could not move Capt. applied a hot Stone raped in flannel, which gave me some temporry ease
Neither Ordway nor Gass mentions Clark’s illness, a silence worth noting: the enlisted men’s journals frequently omit the captains’ physical complaints, suggesting either that such information was considered private or that Clark’s discomfort was not visible enough to register among the crew. Clark also alone records the archaeological landscape of the day’s travel — the abandoned Mandan villages, the note that one village “was entirely cut off by the Sioux & one of the others nearly, the Small Pox distroyed great Numbers.” This is the only mention in the day’s record of the smallpox epidemic that had reshaped the Upper Missouri, and it reflects Clark’s role as the expedition’s principal geographer and ethnographer.
Ordway, by contrast, is the day’s natural historian and hunter. He alone reports the beaver catch (“Several large Beaver every night for Several nights back”), the salt runs in the valleys, and the flocks of goats — pronghorn antelope — visible on the hills. He frames his own day around his hunt: “I went out hunting… I killed a Buffalow and Returned to the Boat in the evening.” Clark corroborates the hunting in passing (“The hunters killed a buffalow bull”) and adds the ecologically telling detail that of roughly 300 buffalo seen, the hunters “did not See one Cow” — an observation about herd composition that neither sergeant thought to record.
Weather, Brevity, and the Gass Pattern
Gass’s entry, at roughly fifty words, is the shortest of the three and follows a pattern visible across many October entries: weather, departure, one notable observation, encampment. His prose has already been smoothed — likely by his editor David McKeehan in the 1807 publication — into complete sentences with conventional spelling, in contrast to Clark’s and Ordway’s manuscript orthography. The result is a narrative cleaner than the originals but stripped of the ethnographic texture that makes Clark’s entry valuable. For the events of October 22, the three accounts are best read as complements: Gass for the bare chronology, Ordway for the country and its game, and Clark for the diplomatic and historical reading of a landscape already marked by Sioux raids and epidemic disease.
