The council held outside the unfinished Fort Mandan on October 29, 1804, was among the most consequential diplomatic events of the expedition’s first season. Three surviving narrators—Sergeant John Ordway, Sergeant Patrick Gass, and Captain William Clark—each set the day down on paper, and the differences among their entries reveal as much about the writers as about the proceedings.
The Enlisted Men’s Ledger of Ceremony
Ordway and Gass produce accounts that share a recognizable structural skeleton: the assembly of chiefs, the firing of the bow gun at eleven o’clock, Lewis’s speech through an interpreter, the distribution of medals and clothing, the closing gun, and the gift of the corn mill. Gass, whose journal was prepared for publication, condenses the day into a single tidy paragraph:
At 11 o’clock, when the Council met, a shot was fired from our bow piece, and the commanding officers took the chiefs by the hand. Captain Lewis, through an interpreter, delivered a speech; gave a suit of clothes to each of the chiefs and some articles for their villages.
Ordway’s version covers the same beats but lingers longer over the goods—”cocked hats & feathers &. C. &. C.”—and over the protocol of rank, noting that the captains “made a 1st & 2nd chief to each village.” Both sergeants record the same closing flourish: Lewis firing the air gun, which “pleased them much” (Ordway) and which the chiefs received with evident satisfaction. Where Gass writes for an eventual reading public, Ordway writes as a careful inventory-keeper, and the parallel sequence of their entries suggests either shared observation post or, more likely, the common rhythm that any enlisted observer at the perimeter of the council would have followed.
What Only Clark Saw
Clark’s entry is markedly different in register and content. He alone names the chiefs—Sha-ha-ka (Big White), Poss-cop-sa-he (Black Cat), Ka-goh-ha-me (Little Crow), Omp-Se-ha-ra (Black Mockerson)—and assigns them by village. He alone records the diplomatic friction beneath the ceremony: the aged Hidatsa chief who “was restless before the Speech was half ended, observed his Camp was exposed & could wait no longer.” And he alone preserves the physical conditions that Ordway and Gass omit entirely:
the S W wind verry high we met in Council under an orning and our Sales Stretched round to keep out as much wind as possible
This detail—the captains improvising a windbreak from the boat’s sails—humanizes the proceeding in a way the sergeants’ entries do not. Clark also records the Arikara dimension that Ordway only gestures toward: the introduction of the Arikara chief Ar-ke-tar-na-Shar and the passing of the sacred pipe, a deliberate choreographing of intertribal peacemaking that lay at the heart of the expedition’s diplomatic mission on the Missouri.
The Prairie Fire and the Half-White Boy
Most striking is what Clark alone reports at the close of his entry. While Ordway ends with the Indians returning peacefully to their villages and Gass closes with everyone “satisfied,” Clark records a catastrophe on the plain:
The Prarie got on fire and went with Such Violenc & Speed as to Catch a man & woman & burn them to Death, Several escapd. among other a Small boy who was Saved by getting under a green Buffalow Skin, this boy was half white, & the Indians Say all white flesh is medisan, they Say the grass was not burnt where the boy Sat
That neither sergeant mentions a fatal prairie fire passing the camp at eight o’clock is remarkable. The omission may indicate that Ordway and Gass closed their entries earlier in the evening, or that the fire was visible only from the captains’ position, or simply that the sergeants prioritized the council’s official business. Clark’s preservation of the Mandan interpretation—that “all white flesh is medisan”—is the kind of ethnographic notation that distinguishes his journal from the more procedural records of his subordinates.
Reading Across the Three
Taken together, the three entries demonstrate the layered documentary value of the expedition’s multiple journals. Gass offers the publishable summary; Ordway supplies the catalog of gifts and protocol; Clark alone provides the names, the wind, the restless old chief, and the fire. No single narrator captures the full day. The corn mill, the air gun, and the closing cannon appear in all three—the public spectacle everyone saw—while the council’s diplomatic substance and the evening’s tragedy survive only because Clark wrote them down.
