The entries for January 17, 1805, written from the winter quarters at Fort Mandan, illustrate how dramatically the expedition’s narrators could diverge in scope and detail when reporting a single day. William Clark’s terse meteorological note, John Ordway’s cryptic fragment, and Patrick Gass’s expansive narrative together form a layered record in which each writer contributes a different order of information.
The Captain’s Instrument and the Sergeant’s Shorthand
Clark’s entry is characteristically compact, organized around the thermometer and the wind:
17th January Thursday 1805 a verry windey morning hard from the North Thermometer at 0, Several Indians here to day
This is the captain in his role as scientific observer. Clark fixes the day with three coordinates — wind direction, temperature, and the presence of Indigenous visitors — and offers no further commentary. The reading of zero degrees Fahrenheit is the kind of quantitative datum that Lewis and Clark were directed by Jefferson to collect, and Clark records it without elaboration.
Ordway’s entry on the same date is reduced almost to a cipher: “the N. W. *” The fragment appears to abbreviate a wind observation — likely a notation that the wind shifted to or blew from the northwest — paired with a marker that may have keyed to a longer note. Where Clark writes “hard from the North,” Ordway logs only a compass bearing. The discrepancy between the two readings is itself notable: the wind may have shifted during the day, or one writer may have recorded the prevailing direction while the other noted a change.
Gass’s Expanded Canvas
By contrast, Patrick Gass’s entry for the same day reads as a small chronicle. Whereas Clark and Ordway compress the day into weather symbols, Gass widens the lens to include the hunters’ returns, an inventory of game, an anecdote of necessity, and a detailed account of a Mandan man’s near-fatal exposure:
generally very cold ; but our hunters were frequently out. One of them killed a beautiful white hare. These animals are said to be plenty. We killed a small buffaloe, 3 elk, 4 deer and two or three wolves.
Gass alone records the white hare — almost certainly a white-tailed jackrabbit in winter pelage — and his aesthetic adjective (“beautiful”) reveals a register Clark rarely permits himself in his weather log. Gass also preserves a detail about subsistence that the captains pass over entirely: three hunters down the river, killing nothing for two days, were reduced to eating a wolf, which they reported “relished … pretty well, but found it rather tough.” The wry tone is Gass’s own, and it captures a quality of expedition humor that the captains’ more administrative prose tends to filter out.
A Mandan Hunter’s Ordeal
The most striking material in Gass’s entry concerns an unnamed Mandan man caught out on the prairie:
A number of the natives being out hunting in a very cold day, one of them gave out on his return in the evening ; and was left in the plain or prairie covered with a buffaloe robe. After some time he began to recover and removed to the woods, where he broke a number of branches to lie on, and to keep his body off the snow. In the morning he came to the fort, with his feet badly frozen, and the officers undertook his cure.
This passage is unique to Gass among the three narrators present. Clark, who supervised much of the expedition’s medical practice, notes only that “Several Indians here to day” — a phrase that almost certainly encompasses the frostbitten hunter, but which strips away the narrative of survival. Gass renders the man as an active agent: he revives, relocates to the timber, breaks branches for insulation, and walks to the fort under his own power. The ethnographic value of the passage lies precisely in this attention to Mandan winter survival technique — the buffalo robe, the choice of woodland shelter, the bedding of broken branches — which Gass observes as practical knowledge rather than mere incident.
Read together, the three entries demonstrate how the expedition’s documentary record depends on the simultaneous operation of multiple registers. Clark supplies the instrument reading; Ordway, on this day, contributes only a fragment; Gass alone preserves the human and ethnographic texture of a zero-degree day at Fort Mandan. Without Gass’s account, the day would survive as little more than a number on a thermometer.
