The entries for December 22, 1804, present an unusually clear case study in how the expedition’s enlisted journalists handled a shared scene. Sergeant John Ordway, Sergeant Patrick Gass, Private Joseph Whitehouse, and Captain William Clark all record the same trading encounter at Fort Mandan, where Indigenous visitors arrived in numbers to exchange foodstuffs for small manufactured goods. The four accounts, read side by side, reveal both the chain of textual borrowing among the sergeants and the distinct observational priorities that separated the captains’ record from the enlisted men’s.
A Shared Sentence, Three Hands
Ordway, working closest to the scene of construction, frames the day around labor: “Setting the Pickets a Great nomber of the Savages visited us brought corn & beans to Trade with us.” His list of what the visitors wanted — “looking Glases Beeds buttens or & other kinds of articles pleasing to the Eye” — emphasizes the aesthetic appeal of trade goods to the Mandan customers.
Gass and Whitehouse, by contrast, invert the transaction. Gass writes:
A great number of the natives came with corn, beans and mockasins to trade, for which they would take anything—old shirts, buttons, awls, knives and the like articles.
Whitehouse’s entry is nearly a verbatim echo:
a great nomber of the natives came to the fort with corn beans and moccasons to trade. they take any trifling thing in exchange viz.—old Shirts buttons knives awls &c &c.
The parallels are too close to be coincidental. Both list the same three trade items in the same order (corn, beans, moccasins), both characterize the goods accepted as essentially worthless from a Euro-American perspective (“anything” / “any trifling thing”), and both enumerate shirts, buttons, awls, and knives. Whitehouse’s “trifling thing” sharpens Gass’s “anything” into something closer to disdain, and his use of the Latinate abbreviation “viz.” suggests a journal-keeper consciously shaping his prose. The editorial note appended to Whitehouse’s manuscript — that this entry marks the beginning of his own handwriting — is significant: from December 22 forward, Whitehouse is writing in his own hand, but the close textual relationship to Gass indicates the journals were being shared, compared, or copied among the sergeants and privates.
Ordway’s framing — Mandan visitors drawn by what was “pleasing to the Eye” — and Gass and Whitehouse’s framing — Mandan visitors taking “trifling” castoffs — describe the same exchange in opposite registers. Ordway grants the trade partners a discerning aesthetic sense; Gass and Whitehouse imply naïveté. Neither framing captures the strategic acumen the Mandan exercised at this trading center on the Upper Missouri.
Clark Looks Elsewhere
Clark’s entry begins with the same scene but immediately diverges. He alone notes the gender presentation of the visitors — “a number of Squars womn & men Dressed in Squars Clothes” — a detail that hints at the presence of two-spirit individuals among the Mandan traders, which the sergeants pass over entirely. Where the enlisted men dwell on the goods exchanged, Clark devotes only one sentence to the trade itself before pivoting to a specimen acquired the same day:
we precured two horns of the animale the french Call the rock mountain Sheep those horns are not of the largest kind
The captain then settles into the descriptive natural history that Lewis and Clark were charged with producing. He records the Mandan name — “Ar-Sar-ta” — compares the animal’s size to deer and elk, and describes the horn’s curvature “like the horn of a Ram.” The entry breaks off mid-measurement, with a blank left for the figure he intended to enter later: “which is ____ inchs thick.”
Patterns in the Record
The December 22 entries illustrate three recurring features of the expedition’s documentary record. First, the sergeants and privates often produced near-parallel accounts, suggesting either oral comparison at the end of the day or direct copying. Second, Ordway frequently grounds his entries in the day’s labor — here, picketing the fort — in a way Gass and Whitehouse do not. Third, Clark’s journal consistently registers ethnographic and zoological detail that the enlisted journals omit, including the gender variance among the visiting Mandans and the bighorn sheep specimen. The trading scene that filled the sergeants’ pages was, for Clark, a single sentence on the way to the more pressing business of describing a previously undocumented animal.
