The entries of April 2, 1805 from Fort Mandan present a study in narratorial division of labor. Three men — Sergeant Patrick Gass, Sergeant John Ordway, and Captain William Clark — write on the same overcast, rain-soaked day during the final push to load the keelboat for its return to St. Louis and prepare the permanent party for its ascent of the Missouri. Yet each records a strikingly different slice of fort life, revealing how rank, responsibility, and habit shaped what an expedition journalist chose to preserve.
Cargo, Weather, and Command
Gass, the carpenter-turned-sergeant whose journal tends toward the practical, focuses on the keelboat’s freight. He itemizes the natural-history specimens being prepared for shipment east:
of skins, buffaloe robes, and horns of the Mountain ram, of a great size for the president; and began to load the boat.
The phrase “for the president” reflects the men’s awareness that their labors were destined for Thomas Jefferson’s personal inspection — a fact reinforced independently in Clark’s entry. Gass’s terseness is characteristic: he names the goods, identifies the recipient, and marks the moment loading began.
Ordway, by contrast, offers only a fragmentary weather note in the surviving text — wind “from the N. W.” through the latter part of the previous night, with the day turning “pleasant.” Ordway’s meteorological entries often serve as a baseline against which the captains’ more elaborate observations can be checked. Here, his “pleasant” assessment of the day’s later hours sits in mild tension with Clark’s framing of the day as “a Cold rain day,” a discrepancy likely explained by the timing of each man’s writing: Clark composed his entry during or just after the rain, while Ordway summarized the full diurnal arc.
Clark’s Double Entry and the Letter to Jefferson
Clark, uniquely among the three, produced what amounts to two entries for April 2 — a sign of the volume of business pressing on the captains in these final Fort Mandan days. The first entry is dominated by correspondence:
I conclude to Send my journal to the President of the United States in its original State for his own perusial, untill I call for it or Some friend if I should not return, an this journal is from the 13th of May 1804 untill the 3rd of April 1805.
This is one of the most consequential sentences Clark wrote during the winter. He acknowledges both the documentary value of his record and the genuine possibility that he might not survive the journey ahead. The phrase “in its original State” — meaning unrevised — has shaped two centuries of editorial debate about which Clark manuscripts represent field originals and which are later fair copies. Clark’s admission that he wrote “untill verry late at night” with “but little time to devote to my friends” hints at the dozens of personal letters that left Fort Mandan with the returning party.
His second entry, dated the same Friday, shifts to fort affairs. Clark records a small diplomatic rupture:
The 2d Chief of the 2d Mandan Village took a miff at our not attending to him perticelarely after being here about ten day and moved back to his village
Neither Gass nor Ordway notes this departure — a reminder that intercultural diplomacy was largely a captain’s concern, and that the enlisted journalists rarely tracked the comings and goings of named Mandan leaders. Clark also reports that the Mandans had killed twenty-one elk fifteen miles below the fort the previous day, though the animals were “So meager that they Scercely fit for use,” a detail useful for reconstructing the late-winter condition of game in the Knife River region.
Cross-Narrator Patterns
The April 2 entries illustrate a recurring division across the Fort Mandan winter: Gass tracks material objects and labor, Ordway monitors weather and routine, and Clark synthesizes diplomacy, hydrology (“the river is falling fast”), and command-level correspondence. None of the three appears to be copying another on this date — the content barely overlaps — which suggests each man was writing from his own observation rather than from a shared captain’s log. The convergence on the keelboat-loading theme (explicit in Gass, implicit in Clark’s “all thing nearly ready”) confirms that the fort’s central activity was unmistakable to every observer, even when each chose to frame it differently.
