The council held near present-day Fort Calhoun, Nebraska — the site Lewis christened “Council Bluff” — marked the expedition’s first formal diplomatic meeting with Native nations. Three enlisted journalists left accounts of August 3, 1804, and the differences among them illuminate how rank, temperament, and audience shaped what each man chose to preserve.
Diplomatic Substance: Ordway’s Detailed Record
Sergeant John Ordway, the highest-ranking diarist present that day, produced by far the fullest account. He alone names the number of chiefs created and notes the emotional register of the proceedings:
the two Captains held a Counsel With the Zottous Indians & made 6 Chiefs under the american government, they all ReẊd their medel & other presents With Great kindness & thankfulness they all appeared to be Glad that they had Got freed from all other powers &. C. they made some verry sensable Speeches Smoked and drank with us. Shook hands and parted.
Ordway frames the event as a successful transfer of allegiance — the Otoes “freed from all other powers,” a phrase that echoes the captains’ own talking points about the Louisiana Purchase. He is also the only narrator to mention the unresolved subplot of Joseph Barter (La Liberté), the engagé sent to summon the Indians, who had departed their camp early and not yet returned. This kind of personnel detail reflects a sergeant’s administrative awareness.
Patrick Gass, who would later publish his journal, condenses the same diplomatic transaction into a single sentence but agrees on the count:
Six of them were made chiefs, three Otos and three Missouris.
Gass adds the breakdown by nation that Ordway omits, suggesting either independent observation or access to a shared field tally. His remark that the Indians “appeared well pleased with the change of government” reads as a polished, almost editorial gloss — consistent with the more finished prose of his published version.
Floyd’s Ethnographic Eye
Sergeant Charles Floyd takes a markedly different approach. Where Ordway dwells on ceremony and Gass on results, Floyd inserts ethnographic context that neither of his colleagues records:
thes is the ottoe and the Missouries the Missouries is a verry Small nathion the ottoes is a verry Large nathion So thay Live in one village on the Plate River
Floyd is the only narrator on this date to explain the demographic relationship between the two peoples — that the diminished Missouri nation had merged with the more populous Otoe and shared a single Platte River village. He says nothing about the number of chiefs created or the speeches given. His attention runs instead to the political geography of the plains.
Floyd is also the most precise about timing and movement: “embarked at 3 oclock P. m under a Jentell Brees from the South Est Sailed made 6 miles.” Gass independently confirms the 3 o’clock departure and six-mile run, while Ordway gives only “about 3 oClock P. M.” The convergence on these figures suggests the sergeants were comparing notes or drawing on the same daily log.
Commerce, Weather, and Mosquitoes
Each narrator closes with details the others ignore. Ordway, looking past the ceremony to future utility, offers a commercial assessment:
Some place near Council Bluff is arround the most proper place for a trading house as their are there three or four nations, the ottas Ponies & Mahar &. C.
This is a striking aside — Ordway essentially proposes a trading post on the very ground where, decades later, Fort Atkinson would be built. Gass, by contrast, ends with a brief weather note: “a storm of wind and rain, which lasted two hours.” Floyd folds the same storm into the following morning’s entry, dating it more loosely to “Last night with wind and thunder from the N. W.” Ordway omits the storm entirely but complains that “the Musquetoes verry bad” — an irritation neither sergeant chose to record.
Read together, the three accounts demonstrate how no single journal captures the day in full. Ordway supplies diplomatic ceremony and commercial reasoning; Gass supplies summary and the ethnic breakdown of the new chiefs; Floyd supplies the underlying ethnography of the Otoe-Missouri alliance. Only by triangulating among them does the texture of August 3, 1804 — the council, the storm, the mosquitoes, the missing engagé — emerge.
