The entries for 25 February 1805 capture the Corps of Discovery in the midst of a critical engineering task: hauling the pirogues and the keelboat onto the high bank above the frozen Missouri in preparation for the spring departure from Fort Mandan. Two narrators present at the scene — Sergeant John Ordway and Captain William Clark — record the day’s work in remarkably parallel terms, while Patrick Gass’s published Journal presents text from a wholly different stretch of the expedition, illustrating how Gass’s 1807 printed volume departs from the strict daily chronology preserved by the manuscript journalists.
Parallel Accounts of the Windlass and Broken Rope
Ordway and Clark describe the same sequence of events with notable consistency. Ordway, writing from the perspective of a sergeant directly engaged in the labor, opens with the practical preparation:
and gitting rollers, brought up the peaces for the windless and all things Got ready to hall up the pearogues on the high bank, in the afternoon we hailed up the 2 perogues without any difficulty, one of them we hailed up without the help of the windless, we then made an attempt at the Barge but our Rope which was made of elk Skin broke Several times
Clark’s captain’s-eye summary covers the identical sequence in more compressed form:
we fixed a Windlass and Drew up the two Perogues on the upper bank and attempted the Boat, but the Roap which we bade made of Elk Skins proved too weak & broke Several times night Comeing on obliged us to leave her in a Situation but little advanced
The two accounts confirm one another point for point: the windlass, the successful raising of both pirogues, the failed attempt on the larger barge, the elk-skin rope that repeatedly parted, and the onset of darkness that forced the men to abandon the work. Ordway adds the small triumph that one pirogue was raised without the windlass at all, and offers the closing image of the barge “laying on the Skids” — a workman’s detail that Clark omits. Clark, by contrast, supplies what Ordway leaves out: weather (“The Day has been exceedingly pleasent”) and the day’s diplomatic traffic.
What Only Clark Records: The Diplomatic Day
While Ordway’s attention stays fixed on the boats, Clark’s entry doubles as a register of visitors. He notes the arrival of the “Black mockerson Chief of the little Village of Big Bellies,” the “Cheef of the Shoe Inds,” and unnamed others who brought gifts of meat “which they packed on their wives.” One chief requested an axe for his son; a Hidatsa man asked leave to lodge overnight with his two wives, and two boys — including the son of the Mandan chief Black Cat — also stayed at the fort. Clark also identifies “Mr. Bunch, one of the under traders for the hudsons Bay Compeney,” placing the day within the wider commercial geography of the upper Missouri. None of this appears in Ordway’s entry, a reminder that the captains’ journals frequently absorb the diplomatic and ethnographic burden while the sergeants concentrate on the tasks immediately before them.
The Gass Anomaly
The entry attributed to Patrick Gass under this date does not in fact describe Fort Mandan at all. The OCR text records the killing of “mountain sheep” that the editor compares at length to the European “Ibex” and “Mufilon, or Musmon,” and describes a country of bare hills, a buffalo killed at a creek mouth, and rapids that required uniting the crews of “two or three canoes” — scenes belonging to the expedition’s later passage through the upper Missouri breaks, not to the winter quarters at the Mandan villages. The dislocated shoulder, the eagle’s nest in a solitary tree, and the encampment after twenty-one miles all signal a summer travel narrative.
This dislocation reflects the well-known editorial character of Gass’s published Journal, prepared by David McKeehan in 1807 from Gass’s manuscript. The printed volume frequently interpolates natural-history commentary — here the extended classical comparison to the Mufflon of “Greece, Sardinia, Corsica and in the desart of Tartary” — that almost certainly originates with McKeehan rather than the carpenter-sergeant himself. For 25 February 1805, Gass’s published text offers no usable witness to the day’s events at Fort Mandan; the historical record on this date rests on Ordway’s workmanlike report and Clark’s broader command journal, which together document both the snapped elk-skin rope and the steady diplomatic foot-traffic that defined the expedition’s final weeks among the Mandan and Hidatsa.
