The entries attributed to November 26, 1804, by Patrick Gass and William Clark present a striking divergence — not of perspective on a shared scene, but of subject matter altogether. Clark, writing from the newly established winter quarters at Fort Mandan, confines himself to weather and the suspension of labor. Gass, by contrast, narrates an elaborate ceremonial reception involving buffalo robes, dog feasts, and night-long dancing. The two passages cannot describe the same day, and the discrepancy itself is instructive about how the expedition’s records were compiled, edited, and printed.
Clark’s Spare Fort Mandan Entry
Clark’s journal for the date is terse and meteorological. He records:
26th of Novr. 1804 Monday Fort Mandan a little before day light the wind shifted to the N. W. and blew hard and the air Keen & Cold all day, Cloudy and much the appearance of Snow; but little work done to day it being Cold &c.
The party had reached the Mandan villages on October 26 and 27 and had spent the first weeks of November selecting a site and raising the timbers of Fort Mandan. By late November, the captains’ attention had turned almost entirely to construction, hunting, and the rapidly intensifying plains winter. Clark’s brevity here is characteristic of his Fort Mandan winter entries: when work halted, so did his pen. He notes the wind direction, the cold, the cloud cover — the practical concerns of men trying to close in their huts before deep winter.
Gass’s Ceremonial Scene — From an Earlier Date
Gass, by contrast, describes a wholly different setting:
The bank of the river on the south side was covered all the way with Indians ; and at 10 o’clock we met the whole band, and anchored about 100 yards from the shore.
He goes on to describe a formal council in which Clark is carried ashore in a buffalo robe by eight men, followed by Lewis receiving the same honor:
When the Indians saw him coming they met him with a buffaloe robe, spread it out and made him get into it, and then eight of them carried him to the council house.
This scene corresponds unmistakably to the expedition’s reception by the Arikara in early October 1804, well over a month before the date assigned here. Clark’s own journals from October 9 and 10 describe the buffalo-robe carrying ceremony, the killing of dogs for feasting, and women dancing late into the night. Gass — or, more precisely, the editor David McKeehan, who reworked Gass’s manuscript for the 1807 Pittsburgh imprint — appears to have either misdated the entry or condensed events from earlier in the journey into a passage that landed under the wrong heading.
What the Mismatch Reveals
The contrast between these two entries is not a case of one narrator noticing what another missed. It is a case of textual transmission. Clark’s field journal, kept daily and tied to the immediate work of the captains, is anchored firmly to Fort Mandan and to the calendar. Gass’s published narrative, prepared for a reading public hungry for adventure, foregrounds spectacle: the procession, the feast, the all-night dance. Where Clark writes “but little work done to day,” Gass offers eight men, a buffalo robe, and a council house.
Register differs sharply as well. Clark’s prose is administrative — a logbook hand recording wind shifts “a little before day light.” Gass’s prose, mediated by McKeehan, is shaped for narrative momentum: “They killed several dogs for our people to feast on, and spent the greater part of the day in eating and smoking.” The sentence is built for a reader, not a quartermaster.
For researchers, the practical lesson is that Gass’s printed dates should be cross-checked against Clark and Lewis whenever a ceremonial or ethnographic scene appears. The Arikara reception was one of the most vivid encounters of the outbound voyage, and it is unsurprising that it found its way into Gass’s volume in heightened form. But on the actual November 26, 1804, the only reliable witness here is Clark, hunched over his journal at Fort Mandan, watching the northwest wind drive cloud across the Missouri and noting that the men, that day, did very little.
