The entries of February 24, 1805 capture a single day of strenuous physical labor at Fort Mandan: prying the keelboat and pirogues loose from the river ice in preparation for the spring voyage upriver. All three narrators — William Clark, John Ordway, and Patrick Gass — describe the same operation, but their accounts diverge in scope, detail, and chronology in ways that illuminate how each man approached the journal-keeping task.
A Shared Event, Three Registers
Clark, writing as commanding officer, frames the day with characteristic brevity and command-level perspective. He notes the weather, the use of “Great prises” (pries or levers), and the unexpected leak that emerged as the boat broke free:
we Commenced very early to day the Cutting loose the boat which was more difficuelt than the perogus with great exertions and with the assistance of Great prises we lousened her and turned the Second perogue upon the ice, ready to Draw out, in Lousening the boat from the ice Some of the Corking drew out which Caused her to Leake for a few minits untill we Discovered the Leake & Stoped it
Clark then pivots to other matters: the return of “Jessomme our interpeter & familey” from the Mandan villages and visits from “Several Indians.” His entry reads as a daily log of the post’s affairs, with the boat-freeing as one item among several.
Ordway, by contrast, narrows his focus almost entirely to the boat itself, and writes from inside the working party. His account is the most physically textured of the three:
ployed cutting away the Ice from round the Barge, found that the Ice was verry thick clear under hir. we worked hard the water came up in places untill it Got all round hir. towards evening we Got large prizes and put under hir and with much adieu we Got hir started loose and hoisted hir Stern up on the Ice
Where Clark says simply that the boat was “more difficuelt than the perogus,” Ordway explains why: the ice ran “clear under hir,” water seeped up around the hull, and the men had to wedge “large prizes” beneath the keel and lever the stern up onto the surrounding ice. Ordway also corroborates Clark’s note about the leak — “a Small leak where the corking worked out as She came loose” — and adds the practical detail that the men “bailed the water out of hir” before turning to the pirogue.
Gass and the Compressed Timeline
Gass’s entry, written or revised after the fact, telescopes several days into a single summary. He records that the boat and pirogue were freed “At 4 o’clock in the afternoon” and that the work of getting all the craft “safe upon the bank” stretched across “the three following days.” He then looks ahead to the 27th, when the party “made preparations for making periogues to pursue our voyage in.”
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. On the 27th we made preparations for making peri-ogues to pursue our voyage in.
This compression is characteristic of Gass’s published journal, which was edited for print and tends to smooth daily entries into a continuous narrative. Where Ordway is in the moment — “towards evening we Got large prizes” — Gass writes retrospectively, with the outcome already known. He alone supplies the specific time of 4 p.m., a detail absent from both Clark and Ordway.
What Each Narrator Notices
Several cross-narrator patterns emerge. Both Clark and Ordway record the leak in the boat’s caulking, suggesting the incident impressed itself on the working party as a near-mishap; Gass omits it entirely, perhaps because no lasting damage resulted. Only Clark mentions the social dimension of the day — Jessaume’s return and the Indian visitors — reflecting his role tracking diplomatic traffic at the fort. Only Ordway describes the bailing and the seeping water, the detail of a man who was likely standing in it.
The shared vocabulary is also telling. Clark writes of “Great prises,” Ordway of “large prizes” — the same technical term for heavy levering timbers, rendered in each man’s idiosyncratic spelling. Gass, writing for a reading public, drops the working-party term altogether. The triangulation of these three accounts gives a fuller picture of a single day’s labor than any one journal could supply on its own: Clark’s command summary, Ordway’s eyewitness texture, and Gass’s retrospective frame.
