February 11, 1805, at Fort Mandan. Two published journals in this corpus record the day: Meriwether Lewis and John Ordway. Patrick Gass and William Clark have no published journals for this date here. Lewis writes a birth and a medicine. Ordway writes sleds, horse loads of meat, and a clear cold day. Neither man copies the other.
Ordway’s sleds
Ordway’s surviving entry is one sentence:
2 hand Sleds to bring up the 3 horse loads of meat, So that the horses might come by land to be Shod, the day clear but cold.
Meat already killed is the problem, not the hunt as a scene. Two hand sleds are to bring in three horse loads so the horses themselves can come by land to be shod. Weather is “clear but cold.” He names no hunter, no carcass, no woman, no child. If this is a fragment of a longer page, this corpus does not have the rest.
Lewis, opening the same morning, has a party moving too. “The party that were ordered last evening set out early this morning, the weather was fair and could wind N.W.” Fair and cold, northwest wind: the same day Ordway calls clear but cold. Lewis does not say what that party killed, or that they used hand sleds, or that horses needed shoeing. The two sentences sit side by side as logistics from different desks — a captain noting that a detail went out as ordered, a sergeant noting how meat was to be moved and why the horses should come in.
Lewis and the birth
The rest of Lewis’s entry is indoors. He does not name the woman. He writes:
about five Oclock this evening one of the wives of Charbono was delivered of a fine boy.
The woman is Sacagawea; the boy is the child later called Jean Baptiste Charbonneau. Lewis’s own sentence does not use those names. He does mark that it was her first child, “and as is common in such cases her labour was tedious and the pain violent.” He is not writing as the midwife of record. Toussaint Charbonneau’s household is in the fort; René Jusseaume is the man Lewis credits with a remedy:
Mr. Jessome informed me that he had freequently administered a small portion of the rattle of the rattle-snake, which he assured me had never failed to produce the desired effect, that of hastening the birth of the child
Lewis had a rattle by him. He gave it to Jusseaume, who administered two rings, broken small with the fingers, in a little water. Then Lewis refuses to claim the cause:
Whether this medicine was truly the cause or not I shall not undertake to determine, but I was informed that she had not taken it more than ten minutes before she brought forth
He will allow that the remedy “may be worthy of future experiments,” and then the reservation that belongs to his scientific voice: “I must confess that I want faith as to it’s efficacy.” “I was informed” is the labor as he got it; the rattle is the part he handled.
What each man chose
Ordway’s silence on the birth is not a third narrator’s hunt ledger filling the gap. In this corpus there is no Gass page for February 11, and no Clark page. A reader of Ordway alone would know only that it was clear and cold and that meat and horses had to be moved so the horses could be shod. A reader of Lewis alone would know that a detail set out in a northwest wind and that, about five in the evening, Charbonneau’s wife delivered a first child after a violent labor, with Jusseaume’s rattlesnake rings and Lewis unconvinced. Together they are a working garrison and a household in the same fort on the same day — not because a sergeant ignored a captain, but because each man wrote the work in front of him.
