The first of April 1805 found the Corps of Discovery at Fort Mandan engaged in a single coordinated task — putting the barge, pirogues, and canoes into the Missouri in preparation for the expedition’s bifurcation. The keelboat would soon return downriver to St. Louis with despatches and specimens; the remainder of the party would push west into country no American had mapped. Three narrators recorded the day, and their entries reveal sharply different priorities of observation.
A Shared Event, Three Registers
All three journalists note the launching of the craft and the rain, but the proportion each gives to weather versus logistics is telling. Sergeant John Ordway delivers the briefest account, narrowly observational:
hard rain followed about half an hour then the party turned out and put the Barge and the 8 perogues in to the River commenced raining again at 4 oClock P. M. and continued raining untill 12 oClock at night.
Ordway’s entry is essentially a timeline — rain, work, more rain — without interpretation. He is precise about hours and the count of pirogues (eight, including the canoes pressed into pirogue-service), but offers no commentary on what the rain meant or where the boats were going.
William Clark, by contrast, treats the day as a hinge. His entry layers meteorology, manifest, and personnel into a single dense paragraph. He identifies the rain as the first "Sinc the 15 of October last" — a six-month observation no other narrator at the post matches in such specific terms — and then pivots immediately to the composition of both the returning and ascending parties:
I had the Boat Perogus & Canos put in the water, and expect to Set off the boat with despatches in her will go 6 Americans 3 frenchmen, and perhaps Several ricarra Chief imediately after we Shall assend in 2 perogus & 6 canoes
Clark also pauses to explain the linguistic chain that will carry the expedition through Shoshone country: the Frenchman Charbonneau speaking Minetary (Hidatsa) to his "two wives who are L hiatars or Snake Indians," who will then interpret onward. This is the first time in the journals that the translation apparatus involving Sacagawea is laid out as a working plan rather than a personnel detail. Clark’s second, slightly later draft entry repeats the weather observation almost verbatim — "it is worthey of remark that this is the 1st rain which has fallen Since we have been here" — confirming that the meteorological fact struck him as the day’s signature.
Gass Looking Forward, Not Down
Sergeant Patrick Gass’s published account, written or revised after the fact, conflates April 1 with the days following. Where Ordway and Clark fix on the launching itself, Gass treats it as an opening note in a multi-day passage:
the whole of our craft was put into the water. A considerable quantity of rain fell this day; the first of any consequence that had fallen here for six months. The 2nd, was a fair day but windy. On the 3rd the weather was fine and pleasant. Some boxes were made, in which it was intended to have packed skins of different animals, which had been procured in the country, to be sent down in the batteaux.
Gass independently registers the "six months" without rain, suggesting that this striking dry interval was a topic of conversation at the fort rather than a private observation of Clark’s alone. But Gass — or his editor David McKeehan — has smoothed the entry into narrative summary, jumping ahead to the boxes built for the natural-history specimens. His readerly orientation toward what the expedition would send back to the United States contrasts with Clark’s planner’s focus on what the western party would carry forward.
Patterns in the Cross-Reading
Two patterns emerge. First, on factual matters of weather, Clark and Gass converge independently on the six-month figure, while Ordway omits it entirely — a reminder that Ordway’s daily journal, though disciplined, is not the source from which the captains’ meteorological remarks descend. Second, the launching of the craft is described in nearly identical clauses by Clark ("had the Boat Perogus & Canoes all put into the water") and Gass ("the whole of our craft was put into the water"), suggesting Gass’s published phrasing may reflect either shared camp idiom or post-expedition consultation with the captains’ notes. Ordway’s wording — "put the Barge and the 8 perogues in to the River" — is the outlier, and likely the most contemporaneous.
Read together, the three entries mark April 1, 1805 as the practical, if not yet ceremonial, end of the Fort Mandan winter: the boats were in the water, the rain had returned, and the linguistic and logistical architecture for the journey beyond the Mandan villages was, in Clark’s hand, written down for the first time.
