The journal entries for January 3, 1805, offer a revealing case of how two members of the Corps of Discovery — Sergeant John Ordway and Captain William Clark — could witness the same day at Fort Mandan and yet produce accounts that diverge in both factual content and editorial emphasis. Both men note the dispatch of a hunting party in response to reports that buffalo were drifting toward the Missouri. Where their accounts part ways is in what each chose to record about the hunt’s outcome, and in a domestic incident that Clark documents but Ordway omits entirely.
Two Versions of the Same Hunt
Ordway provides the fuller narrative of the hunting expedition and its frustrations. He explains the intelligence the captains had received and the disappointment that followed:
went out hunting this morning as the Savages Informed us that the Buffalow were comming in towards the River, but they went out first with their horses first & Scared them off after killing five of them, one of our party killed a woolf they sd Saw a nomber of buffalow. & killed one old Bull.
Ordway’s account preserves a small but telling moment of frontier diplomacy and competition. The Mandan or Hidatsa hunters, mounted and faster, reached the herd first, killed five animals, and scattered the rest before the Corps’s hunters — likely on foot — could close the distance. The Americans returned with only an old bull and a wolf to show for the day’s effort.
Clark’s parallel entry is far more compressed:
3rd of January Thursday 1805 Soome Snow to day; 8 men go to hunt the buffalow, killed a hare & wolf
Clark gives the precise number of hunters dispatched — eight — a detail Ordway leaves vague with “our party.” But Clark mentions a hare rather than the bull Ordway describes, and he says nothing about the Indian hunters arriving first or scattering the herd. A reader relying on Clark alone would not know that the disappointing return reflected anything more than ordinary winter scarcity. Ordway, writing from a sergeant’s perspective closer to the men in the field, captures the frustration of being beaten to the kill.
What Clark Sees That Ordway Does Not
The more striking divergence concerns events at the fort itself. Clark continues:
Several Indians visit us to day & a Gross Ventre came after his wife, who had been much abused, & come here for Protection.
This single sentence opens a window onto the social complexity of Fort Mandan that Ordway’s entry entirely closes. A Hidatsa (“Gross Ventre,” or Gros Ventre of the Missouri) woman had fled to the fort seeking protection from a husband Clark describes as abusive. Her husband followed to retrieve her. Clark does not record the resolution, but the bare fact of the incident establishes that the Corps’s winter quarters had become, at least in this instance, a place of refuge — and that the captains were already navigating sensitive questions of domestic dispute, tribal authority, and the limits of their own jurisdiction among the Knife River villages.
That Ordway omits the episode is consistent with patterns elsewhere in his journal. As a sergeant managing duty rosters and detachments, he tends to register the day’s labor — who hunted, who guarded, what was killed — and to leave matters of Indian diplomacy to the captains. Clark, by contrast, was the journal-keeper to whom such incidents mattered as evidence of the Corps’s evolving relationships with the surrounding nations.
Register and Responsibility
The two entries together illustrate a recurring division of labor in the expedition’s documentary record. Ordway’s prose is narrative and explanatory; he reconstructs cause and effect, even when the causes are embarrassing to the Corps’s hunters. Clark’s prose on this day is clipped, almost telegraphic, but reaches outward to record a human episode Ordway did not witness or did not consider his to tell. Neither account is complete on its own. Read in tandem, they suggest both the practical disappointments of winter provisioning at Fort Mandan and the quieter ways in which the fort had become entangled in the lives of its Native neighbors.
