The 28th of October 1804 found the Corps of Discovery encamped near the Mandan villages, preparing both for a formal council with assembled chiefs and for the construction of winter quarters. A violent wind off the prairie scuttled the diplomatic plans, and the resulting lull in official business produced an unusually revealing set of parallel journal entries. Clark, Ordway, and Gass each note the same cancellation, but the depth and direction of their attention diverge sharply, exposing the distinct documentary instincts each man brought to the expedition record.
One Wind, Three Registers
The most striking feature of the day’s entries is the disagreement over the wind’s direction. Ordway records the gale as blowing "verry high from the N. W.," while Clark, in both of his entries for the day, twice insists it came "So hard from the S. W." and "So violently hard from the S. W." Gass, characteristically brief in the published version of his journal, sidesteps the question entirely:
but could not sit in council, the wind blew so violent.
This small contradiction is instructive. Ordway, a sergeant accustomed to taking independent observations, did not simply copy from Clark — a pattern sometimes assumed for the enlisted journalists. Whether his compass-point differs because of an honest disagreement, a transcription slip, or genuinely shifting gusts across the Missouri bottoms, the divergence confirms that on this date Ordway was keeping his own weather log rather than borrowing Clark’s.
Diplomatic Detail in Clark; Ethnography in Ordway
Clark’s two entries for the day are by far the fullest, and they read as the working notes of the expedition’s chief diplomat. He records consulting "the Black Cat M Chief about the Chiefs of the Different Villages," the arrival of the Gros Ventres (Hidatsa) and "Watersons," and the entertainment of curious chiefs aboard the keelboat. Two passages in particular show Clark’s eye for what the Mandan and Hidatsa themselves found remarkable:
wished to See the Boat which was verry Curious to them viewing it as great medison, as they also viewed my black Servent
Clark also folds in logistical reconnaissance — he, Lewis, and an interpreter walked "up the river about 1 1/2 miles" scouting timber for a fort, finding the situation good "but the Timber Scerce" — and domestic diplomacy, noting gifts of "Corn boild homney, Soft Corn &c." from Mandan women and his own presentation of a jar to the Grand Chief’s wife. Drouillard’s two beaver, taken "above our Camp last night," round out the captain’s panoramic account.
Ordway, by contrast, devotes his entry’s bulk to material that Clark omits altogether: a description of Mandan mortuary practice. He writes that the dead are placed
on the Sd Scaffel Roped up in a Buffalow Robe, a little distance from their villages
and adds that "when any of them loose a partickulor friend or relation they morn and cry for Some time after." That Clark — who walked the village environs that very day — fails to record the scaffold burials, while Ordway provides a small ethnographic set-piece, is a useful reminder that the sergeants’ journals are not simply pale shadows of the captains’. They preserve material the official record loses.
Gass and the Editor’s Hand
Gass’s published entry is the shortest of the three, but it carries a footnote of considerable interest: a reference to "Mackenzie’s account of the funeral rites of the Knisteneaux, in his General History of the Fur Trade." This citation is almost certainly the work of David McKeehan, Gass’s editor and publisher, rather than Gass himself. Its presence in the 1807 published text — alongside Ordway’s manuscript paragraph on Mandan scaffold burial — suggests that Mandan and neighboring funerary customs were a topic of conversation among the men on this windy day, even if Clark’s diplomatic agenda kept such observations out of his own pages. The cross-narrator comparison thus reconstructs a layer of expedition experience that no single journal preserves intact.
What the Comparison Recovers
Reading the three entries together, the postponed council emerges not as a lost day but as a productive one: Clark consolidates his diplomatic intelligence and scouts a fort site, Ordway records Mandan mourning customs, and Gass — through McKeehan — points readers toward comparative ethnography in Alexander Mackenzie. The wind that prevented formal speech-making freed the journalists to attend to other things, and the differences among their pages on 28 October 1804 demonstrate why the expedition’s documentary record requires all of its voices to be read in concert.
