The two surviving entries for February 7, 1805 illuminate Fort Mandan from sharply different vantage points. Sergeant John Ordway, keeping his customary brief log, registers only the steady traffic of Mandan and Hidatsa visitors and the ongoing labor at the forge. Captain Meriwether Lewis, by contrast, devotes his entry to a disciplinary problem and its remedy. Read together, the entries show how the captain’s command prose and the sergeant’s matter-of-fact record complement one another: Ordway describes the routine, Lewis the exception that interrupts it.
Weather, Visitors, and the Blacksmith’s Trade
Lewis opens with the kind of meteorological precision that defines his Fort Mandan winter:
This morning was fair Thermometer at 18° above naught much warmer than it has been for some days; wind S. E. continue to be visited by the natives.
Ordway’s fragment, though truncated, dovetails almost exactly with Lewis’s last clause:
tinue comming to see us and to get blacksmiths work done &. C.
The phrasing is so close that it suggests either shared workshop language around the fort or Ordway’s habitual paraphrase of the captains’ reports at guard mount. What Ordway adds, however, is a detail Lewis omits: the visitors come not merely to socialize but to procure blacksmith work. The forge had become, by midwinter, the expedition’s most reliable instrument of diplomacy and provisioning, with battle-axes and hoe repairs exchanged for corn. Ordway’s notation is a reminder that even the briefest enlisted-man entry can preserve an economic fact the officers’ journals leave implicit.
The Sergeant of the Guard’s Report
The substance of Lewis’s entry is a security matter. He records that
The Sergt. of the guard reported that the Indian women (wives to our interpreters) were in the habit of unbaring the fort gate at any time of night and admitting their Indian visitors
Lewis does not name the sergeant, nor does Ordway — whose extant fragment cuts off before any such report could appear — confirm whether he was the officer in question. The rotation of sergeants of the guard included Ordway, Pryor, and Gass, and on any given night the duty fell to one of them. The interpreters whose wives are implicated would be Toussaint Charbonneau and René Jusseaume, both of whom had taken Indian wives and lodged with them inside the fort. Sacagawea, then heavily pregnant (she would deliver Jean Baptiste only four days later, on February 11), is among the women Lewis’s order would have constrained.
Lewis’s response is characteristically administrative:
I therefore directed a lock to be put to the gate and ordered that no Indian but those attatched to the garrison should be permitted to remain all night within the fort or admitted during the period which the gate had been previously ordered to be kept shut which was from sunset untill sunrise.
The order draws a clear line between Indians “attatched to the garrison” — the interpreters’ immediate households — and casual visitors, who were no longer to be admitted after dark. The captain frames the matter as a question of discipline rather than of trust, but the new lock makes plain that informal hospitality had outpaced what he considered prudent.
Register and Silence
The contrast in register between the two narrators is instructive. Lewis writes in the voice of a commanding officer issuing standing orders, with the formal vocabulary of “directed,” “ordered,” and “the period which the gate had been previously ordered to be kept shut.” Ordway, even allowing for the truncation of his entry, writes in the diaristic shorthand of an enlisted noncommissioned officer: comings and goings, work done, &c. Notably, Ordway’s surviving text contains no reference to the gate, the lock, or the sergeant of the guard’s report — a silence that may reflect either the loss of text preceding the fragment or a tactful omission. William Clark’s journal for this date is not represented among the entries supplied here, leaving Lewis’s account the sole detailed record of an episode that touches directly on the domestic arrangements of the expedition’s interpreters and their families.
