February 2, 1805 was, by all accounts, an unremarkable day at Fort Mandan — the kind of winter Saturday that reveals more about each narrator’s habits of mind than about the expedition’s progress. With the Corps still wintering among the Mandan and Hidatsa villages, the three surviving entries for this date show how differently enlisted men, sergeants, and captains framed the same twenty-four hours.
Clark’s Administrative Eye
William Clark’s entry is the most characteristic of his Fort Mandan winter style: terse, weather-stamped, and focused on the human business of the post. He opens with the day’s quality and the hunters’ tally, then moves immediately to matters of personnel and diplomacy:
2nd of February Satturday 1805 a find Day one Deer Killed our interpeter Still unwell, one of the wives of the Big belley interptr taken Sick Mr. Larocke leave us to day (this man is a Clerk to the N W Company, & verry anxious to accompany us)
Three details stand out. First, Clark notes that “our interpeter” — almost certainly Toussaint Charbonneau — remains unwell, and that one of the wives of a Hidatsa (“Big belley”) interpreter has also fallen ill. Second, the departure of François-Antoine Larocque, the North West Company clerk who had been visiting the fort, gets a parenthetical aside that quietly registers a diplomatic concern: Larocque was “verry anxious to accompany us,” a request the captains had firmly declined. Clark’s parenthesis is the closest thing to commentary in the entry, and it shows where his attention lay — on the politics of British traders pressing for access to the Corps’ westward route.
Ordway’s Hunter’s-Eye View
Sergeant John Ordway, writing from the same fort on the same day, records something Clark does not mention at all:
exedantly [accidentally] this morning the river raiseing one of the hunters went out a Short distance from the Fort and killed a Deer & packed it in.
Where Clark abstracts the day’s hunting into a single number (“one Deer Killed”), Ordway preserves the small narrative behind it — a hunter going out only a short distance, almost incidentally, and returning with meat. The transcription’s bracketed gloss [accidentally] suggests the editor read “exedantly” as an idiosyncratic spelling of that word, though the sense in context is closer to “unexpectedly” or simply as a stray adverb. Ordway also notes the river rising, a detail absent from Clark. This is consistent with Ordway’s broader pattern across the winter: the sergeant tends to register the physical labor and small contingencies of garrison life — who went out, how far, what came back — that the captains compress into ledger entries.
The Gass Anomaly
The text attributed to Patrick Gass for this date is, in fact, not a Fort Mandan entry at all. The OCR’d passage describes the killing of a large brown bear measured in detail (“three feet five inches round the head… five feet inches round the breast”), followed by a sequence of dated entries running from a Monday the 6th through a Sunday the 12th, with references to setting sail, capsizing a canoe, and naming “Warner’s creek.” These episodes belong to the spring and summer of 1805, after the Corps left Fort Mandan in April. The passage is almost certainly a mis-paginated or mis-indexed scan from David McKeehan’s 1807 published edition of Gass’s journal, which heavily reworked the sergeant’s original prose.
The cross-narrator value of the apparent error is itself instructive. Gass’s manuscript for the Fort Mandan winter is sparse, and McKeehan’s printed version smooths and condenses the daily record in ways that often dissolve individual dates into running narrative. Where Clark and Ordway each produce a discrete February 2 entry, the Gass tradition for this date effectively goes silent — a reminder that the four-journal redundancy the captains aimed for was always uneven in practice, and that the published Gass cannot be read as a parallel daily witness in the way the Clark and Ordway manuscripts can.
Patterns of Attention
Read together, the two reliable entries show the division of journalistic labor that had settled in by the second month of the Mandan winter. Clark writes for the official record: weather, game count, the health of key personnel, the movements of foreign traders. Ordway writes closer to the ground, noting a rising river and a hunter’s short walk. Neither copies the other on this date — the entries share no phrasing — which suggests both men were drafting independently from direct observation rather than from a common source.
