The journals of Patrick Gass and John Ordway for 18 April 1805 cover the same stretch of the Missouri in what is now McKenzie County, North Dakota, and record the same essential facts: an early start, a punishing west wind that forced the party to lie to for several hours, Captain Clark’s overland hunt yielding an elk and a deer, and an encampment of roughly fourteen or fifteen miles’ progress on the north side of the river. Yet the two accounts are strikingly different in register and density, and reading them side by side illustrates how the expedition’s enlisted chroniclers filtered a shared day through very different sensibilities.
Compression Versus Accumulation
Gass writes with the brevity that characterizes his published narrative. His entire entry compresses the day into a handful of clauses:
The morning was fine and we went on very well until 1 o’clock, when the wind blew so hard down the river, we were obliged to lie too for 3 hours, after which we continued our voyage.
The wind, the delay, Clark’s game, the harbor, the rain—these are the load-bearing facts, and Gass offers little else. His sergeant’s prose is functional, almost logistical, and reads as though designed for a reader who wants the shape of the day rather than its texture.
Ordway, by contrast, accumulates incident. His entry for the same day stretches across nearly every hour of daylight. He notes the morning’s trapping results, the wind’s shift from west to northwest, buffalo on the south side and elk in a cottonwood bottom on the north, multiple geese killed by multiple men, and a stand of bald eagles—including a nest that one of the men climbed to rob of its two eggs. Where Gass gives a forced halt of three hours, Ordway specifies that the wind rose so high the canoes would have filled with water, and adds the detail that Lewis’s dog Seaman was “b. out”—an abbreviation most editors have read as “brought out” or otherwise involved in the day’s hunting.
The Disputed Beaver
The most revealing divergence is an episode Gass omits entirely. Ordway opens his entry with a small comedy of camp ownership:
Some of the men who Set traps for beaver last night they caught only one beaver & that in 2 traps by one hind foot and one fore foot, they [it] belonged to 2 owners, they had Some difference which had the best rite to it.
The single beaver, pinned by separate paws in separate traps belonging to separate men, becomes a property dispute in miniature—precisely the sort of human-scale incident that animates Ordway’s journal and that Gass, or Gass’s editor David McKeehan, tends to strip away. Ordway is the expedition’s connoisseur of small frictions and small windfalls; Gass is its summarizer.
Ordway also closes with an observation that Gass does not make: “the Game is gitting pleantyier every day.” This kind of running commentary on the expedition’s improving fortunes as the party moved upriver beyond the Mandan villages is a hallmark of his entries and supplies a narrative arc that Gass’s terser prose suppresses.
Patterns of Witness
Neither sergeant is copying the other on this date. Their shared facts—the wind, the three-hour halt, Clark’s elk and deer, the harbor on the north side—almost certainly derive from common experience and possibly from a shared evening conference of the noncommissioned officers, a practice the captains encouraged. But the divergences are too great, and the small details too specific to each writer, for one to be drawing from the other’s manuscript. Ordway’s eagle’s nest, his disputed beaver, and his shifting wind direction are his own; Gass’s mention of “some drops of rain” overnight appears in no other journal for the date.
For researchers, the lesson of 18 April 1805 is that the expedition’s documentary record is densest where its narrators overlap and disagree. Gass gives the skeleton of the day. Ordway supplies the flesh—the quarrels, the climbed tree, the geese counted one by one. Read together, they recover a day on the Missouri that neither alone could fully preserve.
