The 25 November 1804 entries from Fort Mandan offer a striking case study in how three narrators traveling with the same expedition can produce records that diverge not merely in detail but in subject matter. While Sergeant John Ordway and Captain William Clark describe a coordinated diplomatic outing into the surrounding Mandan and Hidatsa neighborhood, Sergeant Patrick Gass’s published journal recounts a confrontation aboard a periogue that bears no resemblance to the day’s actual events at the newly built winter quarters.
Ordway and Clark: Parallel Records of a Quiet Day
Ordway and Clark agree closely on the day’s principal event. Ordway notes that the captain departed with interpreters and a small detachment to visit a nearby Indigenous community:
preters & Six men Set off this morning in order to go 24 miles ab° this place to a nation of Indians called the [blank in Ms.]2 Cap* Lewis & the Intr Rode on horseback 5 men went in a pearogue up the the Missourie
Clark’s journal, written from the perspective of the officer who remained behind, supplies the same basic facts with additional texture:
Capt. Lewis 2 Interpeters & 6 men Set out to See the Indians in the different Towns & Camps in this neighbour hood, we Continu to Cover & dob our huts
The two accounts dovetail on the composition of Lewis’s party — two interpreters and roughly six men — and on the fatigue work continuing at the fort. Ordway’s note that the men were “employed compleating the huts” parallels Clark’s “we Compleated our huts.” Where Ordway leaves the destination nation blank in his manuscript, Clark fills in human detail Ordway misses entirely: the visit of two chiefs to the fort, including “Wau-ke-res-sa-ra, a Big belley and the first of that nation who has visited us Since we have been here.” Clark’s gift-giving — a handkerchief, paint, and a “Saw band” — and his frustration at being unable to converse (“the interpeters being all with Capt. Lewis I could not talk to them”) give the entry a personal register absent from Ordway’s terser sergeant’s log. Clark also closes with two characteristic observations of the kind he tracked obsessively: “Several men with bad Colds, river fall 1½ inch.”
Gass’s Anomalous Entry: A Standoff from Another Day
Patrick Gass’s entry under this date describes something else altogether — an encounter in which roughly fifty Indians arrive, three are made chiefs, and a confrontation develops over a periogue:
Captain Clarke and some of our men in a periogue went on shore with them; but the Indians did not seem disposed to permit their return. They said they were poor and wished to keep the periogue with them.
The escalation Gass records — Clark warning that he had “more medicine on board his boat than would kill twenty such nations in one day” — is dramatic and specific. It is also impossible to reconcile with Ordway’s and Clark’s own accounts of a quiet, cold day at Fort Mandan in which Clark never left the post and the keelboat had long since been drawn up for the winter. The episode Gass narrates closely resembles the well-known Teton Sioux confrontation of late September 1804, more than two months earlier and several hundred miles downriver.
The discrepancy almost certainly originates in the editorial process behind Gass’s 1807 published journal, which David McKeehan reworked from Gass’s field notes. Misalignment of dates between manuscript field entries and the printed text is a known feature of the Gass volume, and 25 November 1804 appears to be one such instance. The entry is valuable as testimony — Gass clearly witnessed the Teton standoff and recorded the threat about “medicine” with conviction — but it does not document Fort Mandan on this date.
Register, Reliability, and the Editorial Layer
The contrast among the three narrators on a single calendar date illustrates the layered nature of expedition sources. Ordway’s manuscript preserves the texture of incomplete knowledge, including the literal blank where a nation’s name should appear. Clark’s field journal, despite its idiosyncratic spelling, captures diplomatic nuance, named individuals, and meteorological data within a few lines. Gass, by contrast, reaches readers only through a printed intermediary whose chronology cannot be trusted at the level of the daily entry. For researchers reconstructing 25 November 1804, Ordway and Clark are the operative witnesses; Gass’s page is best read as evidence about the editing of his journal rather than about the day itself.
This analysis was AI-assisted and reviewed by a human editor prior to publication.
