The entries of December 11, 1804, from Fort Mandan offer an unusually clean three-way comparison: William Clark, John Ordway, and Patrick Gass all describe the same logistical event — horses sent downriver to retrieve meat and recall the hunters — under the same extreme cold. Yet the three narrators frame the day so differently that the entries together illuminate the distinct documentary roles each writer played within the expedition.
Clark’s Atmospheric Science
Clark alone treats the weather as a phenomenon worth measuring and describing. He opens with instrument readings and a calculation:
a verry Cold morning Wind from the north The Thermomettr at (4 oClock A M at 21°) Sunrise at 21° See list. below 0 which is 53° below the freesing point and getting colder
Neither Ordway nor Gass mentions a thermometer or a numerical temperature — a striking absence given that the cold dominates all three narratives. Clark goes further, recording an optical effect that the other two narrators miss entirely:
the Sun Shows and reflects two imigies, the ice floating in the atmespear being So thick that the appearance is like a fog Despurceing
This is a description of a sun dog or parhelion, produced by suspended ice crystals. Clark’s instinct to record the unusual atmospheric optics — alongside his note that the river was “at a Stand” (frozen in place) — marks his entry as the closest the day produces to a scientific log. Lewis, who typically shared this register, is silent on this date.
The Hunt: Four Buffalo or Five?
All three narrators describe the same sequence: horses dispatched in the morning, meat retrieved, hunters recalled and returning by nightfall. But the accounts diverge on a basic fact — how many buffalo were killed. Gass writes plainly:
The hunters came in at dark. They had killed four buffaloe, and had dressed two of them. The cold was so severe they could do nothing with the other two.
Ordway, by contrast, gives a different count and divides the kills between two groups:
one of the hunters who came from the camp had killed a Buffaloe. the rest of the hunters all returned, had killed 5 Buffalow but the weather was so cold that they did not dress but one of them.
Read carefully, Ordway’s tally is six animals (one plus five), while Gass reports four. Clark, the commanding officer, sidesteps the arithmetic entirely, noting only that “at 1 oClock the horses returned loaded at night all the hunters returned, Several a little frosted.” The discrepancy between Gass and Ordway is characteristic: Ordway, the orderly sergeant, tends toward enumerated detail, while Gass often rounds or simplifies. Clark’s silence on the count suggests either that the number was still unsettled when he wrote or that he considered the dressed yield — not the kill total — the operationally relevant figure.
Register and Audience
The three entries also differ in implied audience. Gass’s published-style prose is the most narratively shaped, opening with a causal clause (“the weather too cold to hunt”) and closing with a tidy explanation. Ordway’s entry reads as a sergeant’s report: sequential, concerned with personnel movements (“for the men to all return to the Fort”), and tracking the disposition of horses and meat. Clark’s entry blends command-level observation — the recall order, the visit from “The Black Cat Chief of the Mandans,” the frostbitten men — with the meteorological data that the captains were charged with collecting for Jefferson.
Notably, only Clark records Black Cat’s visit. For Ordway and Gass, diplomatic contact with the Mandan leadership apparently fell outside their documentary remit; for Clark, it was central. Conversely, only Gass offers the human detail that two carcasses had to be abandoned to the cold — a small narrative loss that Ordway converts into the bare phrase “did not dress but one” and that Clark omits altogether.
Taken together, the three December 11 entries show the expedition’s documentary apparatus functioning in parallel: Clark recording instruments, weather optics, and Indigenous diplomacy; Ordway tracking men, animals, and counts; Gass shaping events into readable narrative. The same day at Fort Mandan thus survives in three registers, none of them fully redundant with the others.
