The entries of Patrick Gass and John Ordway for August 17, 1806, document the same sequence of events near the Mandan villages: the lashing together of canoes, the discharge of John Colter to trap with Forrest Hancock and Joseph Dixon, and the embarkation of Chief Sheheke (the Big White), his family, and the interpreter René Jusseaume. Yet the two sergeants’ journals diverge sharply in detail, sympathy, and narrative weight, revealing how differently rank-and-file diarists processed a day of farewells.
Gass: The Compressed Logistical Record
Gass treats the day as a matter of river management. His entry opens with weather — “the weather was cold for the season” — and immediately turns to practical preparations:
We lashed our small canoes together, two and two, as we expect they will be more steady this way and carry larger loads.
The departure of Colter, identified only obliquely as “the man who had received his discharge,” receives a single clause. Gass does not name him, does not editorialize on his decision, and treats the trapping party of Dixon and Hancock as “the two strange hunters.” The Mandan embarkation likewise gets a clipped, almost manifest-style listing: “he, his wife and a child, with Geesem the interpreter for the Big-White, his wife and two children embarked in two of our canoes to go to the United States.” Gass closes with mileage — twenty miles descended against a high wind. His register is that of a working soldier accounting for the day.
Ordway: The Scene-Maker
Ordway, by contrast, lingers. He names Colter explicitly, explains the terms of his discharge, and describes the outfitting in unusual detail:
our officers Settled with him and fitted him out with powder lead and a great number of articles which compleated him for a trapping voiage of two years which they are determined to Stay untill they make a fortune, &C. &C.
Where Gass merely notes that Sheheke embarked, Ordway constructs a tableau. He pauses to clarify Jusseaume’s domestic situation (“I understand he has two wives”), notes that Sheheke brought his only child, and then renders the parting itself with rare emotional texture:
the chief putting his arm round all the head mens necks of his nation who Set on Shore and a number crying and appeared Sorry to part with him he took his leave of them however and we Set out and procd on
This is one of the few moments in either sergeant’s journal where Indigenous emotion is recorded without diminishment. Ordway sees the embrace, sees the weeping men on shore, and registers the chief’s deliberate composure (“he took his leave of them however”). Gass omits this scene entirely.
What the Sergeants Miss — and What Biddle Adds
Neither Gass nor Ordway records the parallel parting that Clark documented elsewhere on this date: the leave-taking of Toussaint Charbonneau, Sacagawea, and the nineteen-month-old Jean Baptiste, whom Clark called “a butifull promising Child” and offered to raise. The sergeants’ silence on the Charbonneau family is itself revealing. Sacagawea, whose presence had been logistically and diplomatically essential for sixteen months, exits the joint sergeant-record without ceremony. The captains noted her departure; their subordinates did not.
The later editorial apparatus around Ordway’s journal — the footnote drawn from Nicholas Biddle’s 1814 paraphrase — supplies the romantic gloss the sergeants withhold. Biddle marvels that Colter, “just at the moment when he is approaching the frontiers, is tempted by a hunting scheme to give up those delightful prospects, and go back without the least reluctance to the solitude of the woods.” Ordway, who actually watched Colter paddle off in the small canoe with Dixon and Hancock, offers no such philosophizing. For him the fact is sufficient: the men “parted with us in their Small canoe” and the natives continued to visit “in great numbers.”
Reading the Two Registers Together
The contrast between Gass and Ordway on this date illustrates a recurring pattern in the expedition’s documentary record. Gass, whose journal had already been prepared for publication by 1807, tends toward terse summary suited to a reading public expecting facts and distances. Ordway’s manuscript, unpublished in his lifetime, preserves the granular, sometimes gossipy observation of a man writing primarily for himself. Where Gass gives the reader twenty miles and a cold wind, Ordway gives the reader Sheheke’s arm around the necks of his counselors. Both are true accounts of August 17, 1806; only together do they convey what kind of day it was.
