The 22nd of February 1805 finds the Corps of Discovery still locked in at Fort Mandan, where the Missouri River remained frozen and the expedition’s vessels sat encased in ice. Two enlisted journalists — Sergeant Patrick Gass and Sergeant John Ordway — both committed the day to paper, and their parallel entries offer a useful case study in how non-officer narrators recorded routine garrison labor.
Two Sergeants, Two Registers
Gass’s surviving entry for the day is a fragment, but the operative clause is unambiguous. He notes that the men cut
away the ice, and succeeded in getting out one of the peri-
ogues.
This is Gass at his most characteristic: terse, outcome-oriented, and focused on the concrete result of the day’s labor. The verb “succeeded” carries the weight of the entry — a full day of chopping at river ice is compressed into the satisfaction of having freed a single boat. Gass, a carpenter by training, consistently registers progress in terms of completed tasks, and his attention here falls on the perogue itself rather than on the men or the conditions.
Ordway, writing the same day, broadens the lens considerably:
Snowed a Short time and cleared off, the men came home last night rested today after a hard fatigue but the men who had remained at the Fort was employed clearing away the Snow from round the Barge and perogues.
Where Gass reports a result, Ordway reconstructs a fuller social picture. He opens with weather — a habit consistent across his journal — then distinguishes between two groups of men: those who returned the previous night from some exterior fatigue and were granted rest, and those who had remained at the fort and were therefore put to work clearing snow from around the barge and the perogues. Ordway’s entry implies a managed rotation of labor that Gass’s silence on the subject does not.
Complementary Details and a Cross-Reading
Read together, the two entries reconstruct the day more fully than either does alone. Ordway supplies the weather (a brief snowfall that cleared), the personnel arrangement (rested returnees versus garrison workers), and the scope of the clearing operation (the keelboat — his “Barge” — as well as the perogues). Gass supplies the payoff that Ordway omits: that the labor of clearing succeeded in actually freeing one of the perogues from the ice. Ordway describes the men “clearing away the Snow,” which is preliminary work; Gass confirms that beneath the snow they were chopping ice and that the effort yielded a vessel.
Neither sergeant mentions the captains’ parallel activity. As the curated context for the period notes, Lewis and Clark were occupied indoors with reports, maps, and the specimen collection destined for President Jefferson, with Clark in particular refining his Missouri River cartography from Mandan and Hidatsa testimony. The sergeants’ entries thus document the other half of the Fort Mandan economy: the manual preparation that would, when the river broke, allow the keelboat to descend with those very reports and the smaller craft to ascend toward the Rockies.
Patterns of Narration
The 22 February entries fit a pattern visible across the Fort Mandan winter. Ordway tends to frame days through weather and personnel; Gass tends to frame them through tasks and outcomes. Neither appears to be copying the other here — the vocabulary differs (“Barge and perogues” versus “peri-ogues”), the framing differs, and Gass omits the weather note that Ordway leads with. This independence is itself worth registering, since at other points in the expedition the enlisted journals show clear signs of shared phrasing.
The combined picture is mundane but telling: a thaw had not yet come, snow was still falling intermittently, and the work of liberating the boats from the river ice was being prosecuted in shifts. One perogue, by Gass’s account, was out. Others remained.
