The expedition’s stay among the Teton Sioux on 27 September 1804 produced one of the richest cross-narrator records of the early voyage. Patrick Gass, John Ordway, and William Clark each describe the same sequence of events — a daytime visit to the Teton lodges, an evening scalp dance, and the late-night accident that severed the keelboat’s anchor cable — but each narrator filters the day through a distinct sensibility. Read in parallel, the three entries reveal not only what happened on the riverbank but how rank, role, and audience shaped what each man chose to record.
The Village by Day: Ethnographer, Quartermaster, Diplomat
Gass opens with the curiosity of a visitor permitted to wander. He counts roughly eighty lodges of about ten persons each, watches women dressing buffalo skins, and registers his discomfort at Teton domestic practices:
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.
Ordway’s account of the village is, tellingly, secondhand. He credits Gass directly:
Sergt Gass informed me as he was at the village to day that he counted 80 Lodges (of the Teton Tribe) which contain ten persons each.
The numerical agreement is no coincidence — Ordway is copying or paraphrasing Gass’s count. But Ordway adds details Gass omits: that the lodges are “built round with poles about 15 or 20 feet high & covered with dressed Buffalo hides painted Some of them red,” that the Teton drag them with dogs, and that he himself watched a dog haul “about 80 weight with ease.” Where Gass notices food and hygiene, Ordway notices transport and load capacity — the instincts of a sergeant tracking logistics.
Clark, meanwhile, scarcely describes the village at all. His attention is on protocol and risk. He records distributing blankets and a peck of corn to the two principal chiefs, drafting a letter to Pierre Dorion, preparing commissions and a medal, and dispatching them to Lewis. When invited ashore he goes warily:
they left the boat with reluctiance (we Suspect they are treacherous and are at all times guarded & on our guard).
The same hospitality Gass reads as friendliness Clark reads as a possible trap.
The Scalp Dance: Spectacle and Suspicion
All three narrators attended the evening dance, and their descriptions converge on the central image — women circling a fire, carrying the scalps of Omahas killed in a recent battle. Gass gives the fullest sensory account, with about twelve musicians “beating on a buffaloe hide, and shaking small bags that made a rattling noise,” and roughly eighty women “rising and falling on both feet at once; keeping a continual noise, singing and yelling.” Ordway compresses the same scene but adds that “the men danced and made Speaches after the women had danced a while.” Clark’s version is the briefest:
at Dark the Dance began as usial and performed as last night. womin with ther Husbands & relations cloths arms Scalps on poles.
For Clark the dance is already a known quantity — “as usial” — and his pen reserves itself for what he considers diplomatically significant, including a renewed offer of a young woman that he reports having “wavered.”
The Broken Cable: One Accident, Three Readings
The day’s defining incident is the midnight collision in which the pirogue, mishandled, swung against the keelboat and parted its cable, costing the expedition its anchor. Gass treats it as misadventure that nevertheless flattered the Teton: warriors rushed to help, and “the circumstance, however, showed their disposition to be of service.” Ordway, ever the procedural sergeant, gives the most technical account — the pirogue “Steared hir above the big boat,” came “full force down against the Bow of the Barge,” and afterward had to be caulked and bailed. He also notes the Teton fired “Several guns for an alarm only,” believing the Omahas had attacked.
Clark draws the opposite inference. The same armed rush that Gass reads as goodwill, Clark reads as evidence of hostile preparation:
this allarm Cap Lewis & well as my Self viewed as the Signal of their intentions… (who we had every reason to believe from ther Conduct intended to make an attempt to Stop our progress & if possible rob us-).
He reinforces the reading by citing Pierre Cruzatte, who reported that the Omaha prisoners had warned him the Teton meant to halt the expedition. The loss of the anchor compounded the danger by forcing the boat to lie “under a falling in bank much exposed.”
The three entries together demonstrate how a single night on the Missouri could be remembered as ethnographic encounter (Gass), operational report (Ordway), or diplomatic crisis (Clark). The textual dependencies — Ordway’s explicit citation of Gass’s lodge count chief among them — also confirm that the enlisted journals were already cross-pollinating in the field, weeks before the expedition reached the Mandan villages.
