The journal entries dated November 5, 1804 present a striking puzzle for readers of the expedition record. Two narrators — William Clark and John Ordway — are unambiguously at the Mandan villages in present-day North Dakota, supervising and participating in the construction of the winter quarters that would become Fort Mandan. Patrick Gass’s published journal, however, describes a day of riverine travel past timbered islands, yellow bluffs, and the mouth of a tributary called Pania River. The contrast offers a useful case study in how the expedition’s narratives were composed, edited, and aligned.
Clark and Ordway: Raising the Second Range
Clark and Ordway corroborate one another closely. Both describe the same labor, on the same day, at the same place. Clark, writing as commanding officer, surveys the broader scene:
I rose verry early and commenced raising the 2 range of Huts the timber large and heavy all to Carry on Hand Sticks, Cotton wood & Elm Som ash Small, our Situation Sandy, great numbers of Indians pass to and from hunting a Camp of Mandans
Ordway, a sergeant directly involved in the work, supplies the carpentry detail Clark omits:
to work eairly raiseing the other line of our huts. & Splitting out punchiens for to lay the loft which we intend covering over with earth in order to make the huts more warm and comfortable
The two accounts complement rather than duplicate. Ordway specifies the splitting of puncheons and the earthen roof intended to insulate the men against a Northern Plains winter. Clark, by contrast, attends to context: the timber’s species and size, the sandy soil, and the steady traffic of Mandan hunters. He alone records sanitation arrangements and ethnographic intelligence — though here Ordway also notes a vault dug “100 yds abo the huts in order to make or keep the place healthy,” a rare convergence of the two on a domestic detail.
Clark also reaches beyond the construction site to record what Ordway does not: a remarkable Mandan antelope drive a few miles downstream, in which hunters “Cought within two days 100 Goat, by Driveing them in a Strong pen, derected by a Bush fence widening from the pen.” He adds a personal aside — “I have the Rhumitism verry bad, Cap Lewis writeing all Day” — and a piece of diplomatic news relayed through the expedition’s interpreter concerning Assiniboine arrivals at the Hidatsa (“Gross Venters”) villages. Clark’s entry is the day’s intelligence digest; Ordway’s is the work log.
Gass’s Displaced Day
Gass’s entry sits awkwardly beside these two. He describes passing “a long island covered with timber,” yellow bluffs with springs on the north bank, the mouth of “Pania river,” and “Goat creek” three miles above. Hunters bring in deer and elk; the party encamps on an island and steps a new mast. None of this matches the stationary construction scene at the Mandan villages, where the keelboat had already been unloaded and the pirogues drawn up for winter.
The explanation lies in the textual history of Gass’s journal. Gass’s original field notes do not survive; the published 1807 narrative was rewritten by editor David McKeehan from Gass’s manuscript, and the dating of entries in the lower-Missouri stretch frequently slips against the dates given by Clark, Ordway, and Lewis. The scene Gass describes — Pania (Poncas) River country, antelope on the bluffs, a new mast under construction — belongs to early September 1804, far downriver. Whether the misalignment originated with Gass’s own retrospective compilation or with McKeehan’s editorial hand, the November 5 heading in the published volume cannot be taken as a record of that date’s events.
Register and Reliability
The three voices differ in register as much as in content. Ordway’s prose is terse and task-oriented, the diction of a sergeant accounting for his detail. Clark’s spelling is idiosyncratic (“verry,” “Rhumitism,” “Ossiniboin”) but his observational range is wide, moving from timber to ethnography to weather to health in a single paragraph. Gass’s published text, smoothed by McKeehan, reads in polished sentences with proper capitalization and standardized spelling — a reminder that its surface fluency is editorial rather than authorial.
For researchers, November 5, 1804 is best reconstructed from Clark and Ordway, with Gass’s entry set aside or cross-checked against the September record. The day at Fort Mandan was one of heavy labor, sore joints, and steady native traffic — the slow assembly of a shelter that would have to hold against a winter the captains had not yet experienced.
