The journal entries for January 5, 1805, present one of the most striking divergences in the Fort Mandan winter record. Three narrators — Sergeant John Ordway, Private Joseph Whitehouse, and Captain William Clark — were all stationed at the same post, yet their entries scarcely overlap in subject matter. Read together, they illustrate how rank, literacy, and editorial habit shaped what each man considered worth preserving.
Hunting and Weather: The Enlisted Men’s Register
Ordway’s entry is characteristically terse, structured around two facts: the temperature and the catch. He notes that three hunters had failed to return overnight and that one had set a trap with a notable result.
verry cold three of our hunters Stayed out all night. A cold morning, one of the hunters Set a trap last night & caught a large Grey woolf.
Whitehouse’s entry, by contrast, is plainly retrospective. He writes about January 5 from a vantage point several days later, summarizing the hunters’ return and their privations:
the 3 hunters which who went down the river a hunting on the 4′!’ Ins! returned on the 7- Ins! they informed us that they had nothing the 2 first days to eat only one wolf which they killed, they informed us that it eat very well, they killed after that 4 Deer & 2 wolves, the weather continued verry Cold, nothing else remarkable hapened Since the 5′.^ Instant.
The phrase “nothing else remarkable hapened Since the 5′.^ Instant” is telling. Whitehouse, writing after the fact, compresses several days of routine cold into a single backward glance. His detail about the wolf — that “it eat very well” — is the kind of practical hunter’s note Ordway omits. The two enlisted men share a register of weather, game, and bodily survival, but Whitehouse’s later compilation gives him room to elaborate where Ordway records only the day’s bare bones.
Clark’s Divided Attention: Cartography and Ethnography
Clark’s entry occupies an entirely different plane. He acknowledges the cold and a snowfall in a single clause, mentions Mandan visitors bringing axes for repair, and then turns to two pursuits that consume his day:
I imploy my Self drawing a Connection of the Countrey from what information I have recveda
This is the cartographer at work — synthesizing Indigenous geographic testimony into the maps that would prove indispensable to the spring’s onward journey. Neither Ordway nor Whitehouse mentions this labor, though it was central to the expedition’s intelligence-gathering mission. Map-making was a captain’s task, and the enlisted journalists do not record what they did not witness directly.
Clark then devotes the bulk of his entry to a long, frank description of the Mandan Buffalo Dance — a ceremonial transfer of hunting power from young husbands to elders through the bodies of their wives. He calls it “a curious Custom” and details its choreography: the circle of old men, the pipe, the young man’s whining request, the repeated offerings of the wife if the elder declines. He even notes the expedition’s participation:
we Sent a man to this Medisan last night, they gave him 4 Girls) all this is to cause the buffalow to Come near So that They may kill thim
What the Silences Reveal
The most striking cross-narrator pattern is what Ordway and Whitehouse omit. Neither sergeant nor private mentions the Buffalo Dance, though it had reportedly continued for three nights and at least one expedition member had been sent to participate. The absence is unlikely to be ignorance; rumor of such an event would have circulated through the small fort. Rather, the enlisted men appear to consider Mandan ceremony outside the proper scope of their journals, which they treat as records of weather, game, and labor.
Clark’s ethnographic candor — written in the same matter-of-fact prose he applies to river measurements — reflects the captains’ explicit instructions from Jefferson to document Native customs. Ordway and Whitehouse received no such charge, and their journals show it. The result is that the same day at Fort Mandan reads, from one pen, as a frozen hunting camp, and from another, as a site of intercultural ritual exchange. Both are accurate; neither is complete without the other.
