The journal entries from October 10, 1804 capture a single day at the Arikara villages from four vantage points. William Clark and John Ordway provide the diplomatic spine of the day; Patrick Gass turns aside from the council entirely to deliver an architectural treatise; Joseph Whitehouse offers only a single line. Read together, the entries reveal how labor, rank, and curiosity shaped what each man chose to write down.
The Council and Its Choreography
Clark and Ordway both structure their entries around the council’s protocol. Clark notes the shifting wind, the late arrival of chiefs from the upper villages, and his suspicion that “a jellousy exists between the Villages for fear of our makeing the 1st Cheif from the lower Village.” He names the three chiefs created — Ka-ha-wiss assa (Lighting Ravin), Po-casse (Hay), and Piaheto (Eagles Feather) — and records that the speech delivered was “Similar” to those given to the Otoes and Sioux. Ordway echoes the diplomatic sequence almost beat for beat:
About 2 oClock P. M. the Chiefs & Warries of the RickaRees Nation assembled at our Camp under the american flag to Counsel with our Officers. Capt Lewis read a Speech to them Giving them Good counsel &. C.
Ordway’s account adds the ceremonial gunfire — “three Guns was fired from our Bow peace” — and itemizes the gifts: “a red coat & cocked hat & feathers & meddels.” The two sergeants’ and the captain’s accounts converge on the air gun demonstration, each writing nearly identical phrasing about Indian astonishment. This kind of overlap suggests either shared evening conversation around the fire or, as elsewhere in the journals, Ordway’s habitual borrowing of the captains’ framing.
Whitehouse, by contrast, compresses the entire day into a single sentence: “our officers held a counsel with the natives and gave them Some presents.” His brevity here is characteristic and serves as a reminder that not every narrator treated council days as significant writing occasions.
Gass the Ethnographer, Ordway the Guest
Gass departs entirely from the council narrative to produce one of the most detailed ethnographic descriptions in his journal — a step-by-step account of Arikara lodge construction. He counts the forked posts (“16 forked posts five or six feet high”), measures the central uprights (“four large forks, fifteen feet high, and about ten feet apart”), and traces the layering of willow branches, grass, and clay. He extends the description to the entry pen, the buffalo-skin door, and the gendered division of labor:
This labour like every other kind is chiefly performed by the squaws. They raise corn, beans and tobacco. Their tobacco is different from any I had before seen: it answers for smoking, but not for chewing.
Gass also records a small but vivid detail no other narrator preserves — crossing back to the boat “with two squaws in a buffaloe skin stretched on a frame made of boughs, wove together like a crate or basket,” a bullboat in operation. Where Clark sees a council, Gass sees a built environment and a working economy.
Ordway, unusually, supplements his official account with a domestic scene. After dark he walked four miles upriver to the second village, where a chief brought him into the lodge and “the chiefs wife Brought us a bowl full of Beans & corn… She then brought 3 more one after another of different kinds of victuals.” His attention to hospitality — repeated bowls, sustained smoking, mutual staring — opens a register of intimate cross-cultural contact absent from Clark’s official summary.
York and the Politics of Spectacle
Clark’s two versions of the day (a field note and a fuller entry) both linger on the Arikara reaction to York, his enslaved manservant. The wording is nearly identical across the two passages — evidence that Clark drafted and recopied — and the content is striking:
Those Indians wer much astonished at my Servent, They never Saw a black man before, all flocked around him & examind. him from top to toe, he Carried on the joke and made himself more turibal than we wished him to doe.
Clark adds that York told the Arikara “that before I cought him he was wild & lived upon people, young children was verry good eating.” Ordway, notably, omits this episode entirely, though a later editorial note (citing Biddle) attaches the same anecdote to his account. The discrepancy is revealing: York’s performance, which Clark frames with discomfort (“more turibal than we wished”), figures in the captain’s record as an event of diplomatic note, while the sergeants either did not witness it or did not consider it journal-worthy. The day’s most-remembered scene, in other words, survives chiefly because Clark wrote it down — twice.
