The ninth of January 1805 produced one of the most thematically unified clusters of journal entries from the Fort Mandan winter. Clark, Ordway, and Whitehouse all describe the same convergence of events — extreme cold, Mandan buffalo hunters caught on the prairie, and two of the Corps’ own hunters missing overnight — yet each narrator frames the day around a different anxiety. Gass, by contrast, appears to be working from an entirely different source, his terse entry describing river travel that bears no relation to the stationary winter camp the other three describe.
A Thermometer and a Missing Boy
Clark opens with the empirical anchor the enlisted men lack: “A Cold Day Themometer at 21° below 0.” His captain’s register is characteristically administrative, cataloguing the day’s events in compressed clauses — “Great numbers of indians go to Kill Cows, the little Crow Brackft. with us, Several Indians Call at the Fort nearly frosed.” But Clark’s entry pivots on a detail the other journalists omit entirely:
one man reported that he had Sent his Son a Small boy to the fort about 3 oClock, & was much distressed at not finding him here
This anguished father and his missing child appear in no other journal for the date. Whether the boy is the same “young Indian” who, in Ordway’s telling, “came came in the Garrison with his feet frost bit,” cannot be determined from the surviving texts. Clark, who as co-commander received reports directly from Mandan visitors, captures the human distress; Ordway records only the outcome.
Ordway and Whitehouse: Parallel Drafts, Diverging Detail
The Ordway and Whitehouse entries demonstrate the textual relationship scholars have long noted between the two sergeants’ and privates’ journals at Fort Mandan. Both describe the same incident in the same sequence: two inexperienced hunters depart, one returns frostbitten in the evening, the other stays out overnight, and a Mandan hunter is left for dead on the prairie before being rescued. Ordway writes:
2 of our party went out a hunting this morning; they got parted from each other & one of them returned in the evening, had Suffered considerable with the cold, we expected nothing else but the other man had froze or would freeze this night
Whitehouse covers the same ground but extends the narrative into the following morning, resolving suspense Ordway leaves hanging: “Some men were going for them expecting they were froze, but they came in before they started well & hearty.” Whitehouse also supplies the most vivid set piece of any narrator for the date — the Mandan hunter who “gave out” on the prairie, was abandoned by his companions, then revived enough to drag himself into shelter:
after they left him he came too So that he changed his position to the woods, & broke branches to lye on, so his life was Spared, but his feet was froze verry bad. they got him to our fort. Cap^ Lewis doctered him.
This is the only mention in the day’s record of Lewis acting in his medical capacity — a notable absence given that Lewis himself produced no entry for January 9. Whitehouse, often dismissed as a derivative journalist, here preserves a detail of expedition medical practice that would otherwise be lost. Ordway’s version compresses the same episode into a single clause: Mandan hunters reported “that two of their young men was froze to death in the prarie [and] that Several of the natives were missing.” Where Whitehouse follows one survivor into the woods, Ordway tallies the missing.
The Gass Anomaly
Patrick Gass’s entry for January 9 is, on its face, incompatible with the other three. He describes passing “a party of Grossventers hunting,” making “about twenty-two miles” and encamping on the north side of a river. The Corps was wintered in at Fort Mandan and traveled nowhere on this date. The fragmentary, OCR-damaged text suggests either a misdated entry, a retrospective compression of earlier travel, or — most likely — corruption in the published 1807 Gass edition, which was heavily edited by David McKeehan from Gass’s original (now lost) manuscript. Researchers consulting Gass for January 9, 1805, should treat this entry with caution and cross-reference Clark’s thermometer reading and the Ordway-Whitehouse hunting narrative as the more reliable record of the day’s actual events.
Patterns of Witness
The day’s accounts illustrate a recurring division of labor among the Fort Mandan journalists. Clark supplies instrumentation and the diplomatic register — the thermometer, “the little Crow,” the distressed father. Ordway provides the aggregate count of casualties, Mandan and American alike. Whitehouse, working at greater length, narrates individual survival stories with a novelistic eye for physical detail. None of the three contradicts the others; together they reconstruct a day at twenty-one below zero in which the line between rescue and recovery of a corpse was, for several hours, genuinely uncertain.
