The entries for 13 December 1804 offer an unusually clean comparison of how three members of the Corps of Discovery handled the same twenty-four hours at Fort Mandan. The core event — two buffalo killed within easy reach of the fort and hauled in by sled — appears in all three journals, but the framing, register, and surrounding detail diverge sharply enough to reveal each writer’s habits.
The Same Hunt, Three Scales
Patrick Gass, characteristically terse, compresses the day to a weather note and the bare arithmetic of the hunt:
moderate. Two hunters went out and killed two buffaloe. One came in, and he and some of the men went out and brought in the meat.
John Ordway records the identical sequence but expands it considerably. He notes that the sleds had been prepared the previous day, specifies that five men returned with the successful hunter, and tracks the carcasses from prairie to fort:
2 men went out a Short time and killed 2 buffaloe one of them came in and 5 men were Sent out with him took a Sled with them and brought in the 2 buffaloe.
Where Gass stops, Ordway keeps writing. He observes Mandan hunters returning from the prairie with horses loaded with meat, records that one of them killed a goat (likely a pronghorn) and presented it to the captains, and then pivots to commerce: two of his mess went up to the first Mandan village to trade for corn and beans with paint and rings. He closes by noting a visit from a North West Company employee down from the Hidatsa (“Grovantars”) village. In a single entry, Ordway sketches the fort’s whole economic web — subsistence hunting, Indigenous provisioning, intercultural trade, and the ongoing presence of British competitors.
William Clark, by contrast, barely mentions the buffalo at all. His attention is elsewhere.
Clark’s Instruments, Ordway’s Network
Clark opens with the previous night’s clarity and a precise observation about frost depth:
the frost which fell Covered the ice old Snow & thos parts which was naked 1/6 of an inch, The Thermotr. Stands this morning at 20° below 0, a fine day.
He then registers a professional frustration — “find it imposible to make an Observation with an artifical Horsison” — before noting almost in passing that Joseph Fields killed a cow and calf a mile from the fort. The buffalo that anchor Gass’s and Ordway’s entries are, for Clark, a one-line afterthought to a meteorological and astronomical report. The contrast is instructive: Clark the captain-surveyor is keeping the scientific record the expedition was charged to produce, while Ordway, a sergeant of the guard, is keeping the social and logistical record of the post.
It is also worth noting that Clark and Ordway disagree slightly on the day’s killings. Clark credits Joseph Fields with a cow and calf; Ordway and Gass speak of two buffalo brought in by sled. The entries may describe overlapping events — Fields could be one of the two hunters Ordway mentions — but neither Gass nor Ordway names him, and Clark says nothing of the sled party. None of the three writers seems to be copying another on this date; the divergences in vocabulary and emphasis argue for genuinely independent composition.
Register and the Cold
The editorial footnote attached to Ordway’s entry quotes Clark on temperatures of 10 to 11 below the following day and Gass’s striking experiment with proof spirits freezing “into hard ice” in fifteen minutes — a reminder that Gass, though laconic in his daily entries, was capable of vivid scientific anecdote when the occasion struck him. On 13 December itself, however, the labor falls cleanly along expected lines. Gass writes like a carpenter logging a workday. Ordway writes like a sergeant accounting for men, meat, and visitors. Clark writes like a commanding officer responsible to Jefferson for numbers and observations.
Read together, the three entries reconstruct the day more fully than any one of them does alone: a 20-below morning too unsteady for the artificial horizon, two buffalo (or possibly a cow and calf taken by Fields) hauled in by sled, Mandan hunters crossing the same prairie with their own loaded horses, a small trading party slipping up to the first village, and a North West Company man drifting down from the Hidatsa to take the measure of the Americans wintering in his territory.
