The afternoon of April 7, 1805 marked one of the true hinge moments of the expedition: the permanent party pushed upriver into country unmapped by Euro-Americans while the keelboat, under Corporal Warfington, dropped downstream toward St. Louis with specimens, dispatches, and Indian delegates bound for President Jefferson. Captain Lewis would memorialize the departure in a passage now famous for its comparison of the little fleet to those of Columbus and Cook. The two enlisted journalists present that day — Sergeant Patrick Gass and Sergeant John Ordway — leave a markedly different record, and the contrast between their entries reveals how rank, temperament, and habits of attention shaped the documentary core of the expedition.
Gass: The Soldier’s Précis
Gass compresses the entire day into a handful of sentences. He notes a council with visiting Indians, the decision that some would descend to St. Louis in the boat, the 5 o’clock departure, and the night’s camp opposite the first Mandan village. His headcount is crisp and quotable:
Thirty one men and a woman went up the river and thirteen returned down it in the boat. We had two periogues and six canoes, and proceeded about four miles, and encamped opposite the first Mandan village, on the North side.
This is the carpenter-sergeant’s habitual register — counts, distances, compass directions. Gass passes over the diplomatic content of the council entirely. He does not name the visiting nation, does not mention the letter from the trader Tabeau, and does not record what cargo went downstream. The phrase “in good spirits” is the closest he comes to interior life, and even that reads as a unit-status report rather than personal feeling.
Ordway: The Diplomatic and Material Record
Ordway, by contrast, devotes the bulk of his entry to events Gass omits. He identifies the visitors specifically as Arikara — “4 of the RickaRee Savages. 2 of them Chiefs” — and explains their errand: ten of their nation had come up to the Mandan villages “to treat & Smoak a peace pipe.” He preserves the chain of communication that Gass elides:
they brought a letter from MrTabbo who lives with [the] R.Ree to our officers with news that 3 of the Souix chiefs was going down on the Big barge to see their Great father and that Some of the Rick a Ree chiefs was going also.
Ordway also tracks the lame Arikara chief who remained behind to travel down with the barge, and he ferries three others across the river — a small logistical detail that Gass does not record at all. Where Gass gives a fleet inventory, Ordway gives a manifest: “Goat Skins & horns, a barking Squerrell Some Mountain Rams horns a prarie hen & badgers Some birds cauled magpies.” This catalogue corresponds closely to the shipment Lewis itemized for Jefferson, and Ordway’s journal effectively functions as the enlisted-man’s confirmation of the captain’s invoice.
Two Fleets at the Same Hour
Both sergeants converge on the departure time and the day’s modest progress. Gass writes that the party “left fort Mandan in good spirits” about 5 o’clock; Ordway records, “About 5 oClock we all went on board fired the Swivel and Set off on our journey.” Only Ordway preserves the swivel gun’s farewell salute. Both note the four miles made against a hard head wind and the camp opposite the first Mandan village — corroboration that helps anchor the day’s geography.
The editorial footnote inserted into Ordway’s published journal supplies what neither sergeant attempts: Lewis’s reflective set-piece on the “little fleet” and his confession that he esteemed the moment “as among the most happy of my life.” The juxtaposition is instructive. Lewis writes for posterity and for Jefferson; Gass writes a soldier’s log; Ordway writes something in between — a working record dense with names, numbers, cargo, and Indigenous diplomacy. Read together, the three voices show how the same five-o’clock departure could be at once a literary apotheosis, a four-mile march, and a complicated act of cross-cultural logistics involving Arikara chiefs, a French trader’s letter, and a barking squirrel bound for the President.
