The 23rd of February 1805 found the Corps of Discovery at Fort Mandan engaged in one of the most physically demanding tasks of their winter encampment: extracting the pirogues from ice that had frozen nearly to their gunwales. Three narrators — William Clark, John Ordway, and Patrick Gass — record the day’s labor, and a side-by-side reading offers a useful case study in how rank, role, and authorial habit shaped expedition journaling.
Three Registers, One Task
Clark, as co-commander, supplies the fullest and most technically attentive account. He frames the difficulty in concrete engineering terms, describing how the men improvised tools when axes alone proved inadequate:
All hands employed in Cutting the Perogus Loose from the ice, which was nearly even with their top; we found great difficuelty in effecting this work owing to the Different devisions of Ice & water after Cutting as much as we Could with axes, we had all the Iron we Could get & Some axes put on long poles and picked throught the ice, under the first water, which was not more the 6 or 8 inches deep
Clark’s measurement (“6 or 8 inches deep”) and his account of lashing iron to long poles to pick through a submerged ice layer are details neither subordinate journalist preserves. His entry also expands beyond the labor itself to record the day’s weather (“warm & pleasent”), Indian visitors, the departure of the interpreter Jessomme’s family for the Shoshone village, and the recovery of the frostbitten boy whose father carried him home by sleigh — a small humanitarian coda absent from the other journals.
Ordway, a sergeant, narrows his focus to the mechanical struggle. His entry preserves the moment of release with a kinetic immediacy that Clark’s more administrative prose smooths over:
towards evening by hard cutting with the water up within an Inch of filling it. Started it loose with pryzes and pulled it out on the Ice & turned on its side, loosed the Ice from round the other.
Where Clark says they “disengaged one Perogue,” Ordway shows it: the water within an inch of swamping the boat, the prying loose, the dragging onto the ice, the deliberate turning on its side. Ordway’s verbs do the work that Clark’s nouns and clauses describe.
Gass and the Problem of Compression
Patrick Gass’s published journal, by contrast, treats the 23rd as the opening beat of a multi-day operation rather than as a discrete event. His entry compresses several days into a single summary:
were engaged in cutting away the ice from the boat and the other periogue. At 4 o’clock in the afternoon we had the good fortune to get both free from the ice ; and in the three following days succeeded in getting them all safe upon the bank.
Two features of this passage merit notice. First, Gass claims that both craft were freed on the 23rd (“At 4 o’clock in the afternoon we had the good fortune to get both free”), whereas Clark explicitly states that only one pirogue was fully disengaged and the second “nearly” so. Ordway corroborates Clark: one was pulled out, the other only had its surrounding ice loosened. Gass’s compression — likely a product of the post-expedition editing his journal received from David McKeehan — flattens the day’s actual outcome.
Second, Gass introduces “the boat” alongside “the other periogue,” language that Clark and Ordway do not use for this date; both speak only of pirogues. The discrepancy is a useful reminder that Gass’s text, as it survives, is the most editorially mediated of the three.
What Each Narrator Notices
The cross-narrator pattern for 23 February 1805 is characteristic of the Fort Mandan winter as a whole. Clark serves as the comprehensive recorder, integrating labor, weather, diplomacy, and medical follow-up into a single entry. Ordway, writing for himself rather than for command, captures the texture of the work — the prying, the near-swamping, the physical handling of the boat. Gass, or his editor, summarizes for a reading public, smoothing the day’s partial success into a tidier narrative of accomplishment.
None of the three narrators contradicts the others on the essential facts: the ice had risen nearly level with the pirogues’ tops, the men labored with axes and improvised iron-tipped poles, and by day’s end at least one craft was on the bank. But only by reading the three together does the day acquire its full dimension — the engineering improvisation Clark documents, the moment of release Ordway dramatizes, and the multi-day arc within which Gass situates the effort.
This analysis was AI-assisted and reviewed by a human editor prior to publication.
