By mid-March 1805, Fort Mandan was a hive of preparation. The keelboat would soon return downriver with specimens and reports for President Jefferson, while the permanent party readied itself for the unknown country above the Knife River villages. The journal entries of William Clark and Sergeant John Ordway for March 15 capture the same domestic labors of that Friday — but the two men, writing from different vantages within the post’s hierarchy, preserve notably different details.
Two Accounts of the Same Chores
Ordway’s entry is characteristically terse. The sergeant records only the essentials of the day’s work:
Indian goods put out to air. Some men employed Shelling corn.
Clark, writing as a commanding officer with broader responsibility for the expedition’s stores, expands the same scene considerably:
15th of March Friday 1805 a fine day I put out all the goods & Parch meal Clothing &c to Sun, a number of Indians here to day They make maney remarks respecting our goods &c. Set Some men about Hulling Corn &c.
The overlap is unmistakable. Both men note the airing of trade goods and the shelling — or as Clark calls it, “Hulling” — of corn. The verbal echo (“Some men employed Shelling corn” / “Set Some men about Hulling Corn”) suggests the kind of shared reporting language that circulated among the journal-keepers, with sergeants such as Ordway often adopting phrasing that paralleled the captains’ daily orders.
What Each Narrator Chose to Preserve
The differences between the two entries are more telling than the similarities. Clark notes the weather (“a fine day”), specifies the inventory put out to dry — not just the trade goods but also “Parch meal Clothing &c” — and assumes personal agency for the task (“I put out all the goods”). Ordway, by contrast, renders the work in the passive voice (“Indian goods put out to air”), erasing the question of who directed the operation.
More striking is what Ordway omits entirely: the presence of Mandan and Hidatsa visitors. Clark records that “a number of Indians here to day They make maney remarks respecting our goods.” This is the kind of cross-cultural observation that Clark, in his role as a captain managing diplomatic relations, was attentive to in a way his sergeant was not. The Indian visitors’ “maney remarks” — which Clark unfortunately does not transcribe — would have constituted both social commentary and a form of inventory, as the Mandans assessed what the Corps possessed and, by extension, what they might trade or expect as gifts. Ordway, focused on the labor at hand, lets the visitors disappear from the record altogether.
Register, Hierarchy, and the Texture of a Garrison Day
The contrast in register is consistent with patterns visible across the Fort Mandan winter. Clark’s prose, even when describing routine fatigue duties, tends to register weather, human presence, and the captains’ decision-making. Ordway’s prose strips events to their operational core: what was done, by whom in general terms, with what tools or materials. Read together, the two entries function almost as command log and work log — Clark documenting the day as a leader accountable for goods and diplomacy, Ordway documenting it as a non-commissioned officer accountable for tasks completed.
The chores themselves are revealing of the expedition’s late-winter priorities. Airing the trade goods — beads, cloth, knives, awls, vermilion, and the like — was essential maintenance after months in storage; damp or mildewed goods would lose value among the Upper Missouri nations and the unknown peoples beyond. Shelling and hulling corn, much of it acquired from Mandan and Hidatsa villages over the winter, prepared the staple that would feed the Corps as it ascended into country where game might prove uncertain. Both labors point forward, toward the April 7 departure that was now less than four weeks away.
That two narrators looking at the same yard of drying cloth and shelled corn produced such different sentences is a useful reminder of why the Lewis and Clark journals are read in parallel rather than singly. Neither account alone conveys the full texture of March 15, 1805 — the fine weather, the watching Mandan visitors, the captains directing, the men working — but read against one another, Clark and Ordway restore that ordinary Friday to view.
