The 30 August 1806 entries from Patrick Gass, John Ordway, and William Clark describe a single event: an armed riverine standoff with a band of Teton Sioux led by Black Buffalo (Tar-tack-kah-sabbar), the same chief whose people had attempted to detain the expedition near the Teton River in the fall of 1804. Read together, the three accounts illuminate how rank, audience, and proximity to the negotiation shaped each narrator’s record.
Numbers, Distance, and the Problem of Counting
The most immediate divergence among the narrators is the size of the Indian party. Gass, writing in a compressed retrospective register, reports “a band of the Teetons, fifty or sixty in number.” Ordway, closer to the action and writing the same day, gives a markedly larger figure: “Soon gathered about two hundred on the Shore besides Some boys and young men.” Clark, who actually crossed to the sandbar to parley, splits the difference with precision, noting first “about 20 indians” on the eminence and then “80 or 90 Indian men all armed with fusees & Bows & arrows” emerging from the woods.
Clark’s two-stage count — initial sighting followed by a larger armed body emerging — likely reflects what he actually observed through his spyglass before the full band revealed itself. Ordway’s “two hundred” probably folds together warriors, women, boys, and the “great number of horses” he mentions. Gass, writing at the greatest narrative remove, rounds down to a manageable figure.
Who Spoke, and in What Language
All three narrators record the linguistic difficulty of the encounter, but only Clark documents the methodical triage. Clark writes that he took
three french men who could Speak the Mahar Pania and some Seioux and in a Small canoe I went over to a Sand bar… I derected the men to Speak to them in the Pania and mahar Languages first neither of which they could understand I then derected the man who could Speak a fiew words of Seioux to inquire what nation or tribe they belong to
Ordway compresses this procedure into a single line: “one of our men Spoke to them in panie [Pawnee] tongue and told them that we could not Speak their Language.” Gass goes further still, eliding the sandbar trip entirely and attributing the communication to the party as a whole: “one of our men understanding the language of the Ponis, of which they understood some words; we through him let them know that we wanted to have nothing to do with them.”
The pattern is characteristic. Gass, the carpenter-sergeant whose published 1807 journal was edited for a popular audience, consistently flattens command structure into collective action (“we”). Clark, the officer making decisions, preserves the chain of delegation. Ordway, a sergeant accustomed to recording orders, falls between the two registers.
The Threat That Only Ordway Records
Ordway’s entry contains a striking detail absent from both Gass and Clark: an overheard threat. Ordway writes that
Mre Jessom could understand Some words they said and [s]he heared them Say that if we came on their Side of the river they would kill us & that we were good for to kill
This is a significant ethnographic and narrative datum — a reported speech act from the Teton side of the river, mediated through a member of the party (likely René Jusseaume or a relative) with Sioux comprehension. Clark, who was on the sandbar conducting the actual parley, does not mention it; his entry breaks off mid-confrontation in the surviving text. Gass, writing without access to bilingual eavesdropping, simply reports the Indians’ withdrawal to the hills.
That Ordway alone preserves this overheard threat suggests he was gathering information from multiple party members back at the canoes while Clark was occupied at the front. It is a useful reminder that the “definitive” captain’s journal is not always the most complete witness to a day’s events.
Plums, Squirrels, and the Texture of the Day
Clark alone records the sensory frame around the confrontation: the “large plumb orchd of the most deelicious plumbs” where two bull elk were killed, and the dispatch of two men “to a village of Barking Squirels” just before the Tetons appeared. Ordway notes the plums in passing (“gathered a quantity of fine plumbs”); Gass omits them entirely, jumping from buffalo and elk directly to the Teton encounter. The contrast underscores how Gass’s published narrative privileges incident over landscape, while Clark’s field journal preserves the ordinary business of a foraging descent suddenly interrupted by armed men on a ridge.
