The journal entries for January 31, 1805 offer an unusually clear demonstration of how rank, role, and writerly purpose shaped what each Fort Mandan diarist preserved. All three writers note the same departure of hunters and the same blustery weather, but only Captain William Clark records the medical events that almost certainly dominated the day inside the fort’s walls.
Shared Surface, Divergent Depth
The convergence among the three accounts is striking at the level of bare fact. Sergeant John Ordway notes briefly that “the wind high from N. W. the Snow flew five men went out a hunting took two horses with them.” Sergeant Patrick Gass echoes the same hunting party, observing that the men “went out with two horses,” and adds a more developed weather arc:
In the morning the wind blew and was cold, towards the middle of the day the weather became more moderate, and the afternoon was pleasant.
Clark’s opening likewise records that it “Snowed last night, wind high from the N W” and that he “Sent 5 men down the river to hunt with 2 horses.” The numerical agreement — five men, two horses — confirms that Ordway and Clark are reporting the same event, and that Gass, writing his published narrative from notes, retained the horse count if not the man count. Where Ordway is telegraphic and Gass narrative, Clark is administrative: he specifies direction (“down the river”), a detail neither sergeant supplies.
The Captain’s Surgical Day
The most arresting line in any of the three entries appears only in Clark’s journal:
Sawed off the boys toes
The reference is to the young Mandan boy whose feet had been frostbitten during the late-January cold snap and who had been brought to the fort for treatment. The captains had been monitoring the necrosis for days; the amputation on January 31 was the surgical climax of that case. Yet neither Ordway nor Gass mentions it. The omission is consistent with a pattern visible across the Fort Mandan winter: the enlisted journalists tend to record what happens outside the fort — hunting parties, Indian visitors, weather — while medical interventions performed by the captains pass without comment unless an enlisted man is the patient.
Clark’s entry continues with two further medical notes invisible in the other journals. He observes that “our interpeter Something better,” referring to Toussaint Charbonneau or possibly René Jusseaume, and then reports a fresh case:
George Drewyer taken with the Ploursey last evening Bled & gave him Some Sage tea, this morning he is much better
That George Drouillard — the expedition’s most valued hunter and interpreter — had been bled the previous evening for pleurisy is a fact of real consequence to the Corps’ operational readiness. Ordway, who as orderly sergeant might be expected to track the men’s fitness, says nothing. Gass, similarly, gives the day over entirely to weather. The silence suggests that Clark’s medical chest was a captain’s domain and that the sergeants either were not present at the bleeding or did not regard it as journal-worthy material.
Register and Revision
The three entries also illustrate the register differences that distinguish the surviving Lewis and Clark texts. Ordway’s prose is unpunctuated and field-immediate, the work of a man writing at the end of a duty day. Gass’s entry, by contrast, has the smoothed contours of editorial revision: the tripartite weather progression (“the morning… the middle of the day… the afternoon was pleasant”) reads as a sentence shaped for publication, which is in fact what happened to Gass’s journal when David McKeehan prepared it for the press in 1807. Clark’s prose sits between the two — telegraphic in its clinical clauses (“Bled & gave him Some Sage tea”), but registering the full texture of a commander’s day, from frostbite surgery to therapeutic tea to the closing judgment, “Cold disagreeable.”
For researchers reconstructing the Fort Mandan winter, January 31 is a useful reminder that the enlisted journals cannot be relied upon to corroborate the captains on internal fort matters. Where Ordway and Gass agree on the hunters, they agree because the hunters walked past them out the gate. What happened inside the surgeon’s quarters that morning survives in Clark alone.
