By late March 1805, the Corps of Discovery was readying itself to leave Fort Mandan after a long winter on the upper Missouri. The canoes built upriver near the timber stands had to be brought down to the main channel before the ice cleared. The journal entries of Sergeant John Ordway and Captain William Clark for 20 March 1805 both record this labor, but the two narrators frame the day in markedly different ways.
Two Registers, One Task
Ordway’s entry is characteristically brief and operational. Writing from the perspective of an enlisted sergeant tracking the day’s assignments, he notes simply:
Clark and Six men went up to help draw the perogues to the River Missouris. the after part of the day pleasant.
The detail Ordway preserves is the chain of command and the manpower committed — Clark plus six — and a terse weather note. He does not specify how far the canoes were moved, how many were brought down, or whom Clark encountered. For Ordway, the news of the day is that a work party went out and the afternoon turned fair.
Clark’s own account, by contrast, is layered. He produced what appear to be two passes at the day: a short retrospective summary (“I visited the Mandans on the 20th & have the canoes taken to the River, ready to Decend to the fort when the River Clears”) and a fuller dated entry headed “Fort Mandan 20th March Wednesday 1805.” In the longer version Clark writes:
I with all the men which could be Speared from the Fort went to Canoes, there I found a number of Indians the men carried 4 to the River about 11/2 miles thro the Bottom, I visited the Chief of the Mandans in the Course of the Day and Smoked a pipe with himself and Several old men. cloudy wind hard from N.
What Each Narrator Notices
The discrepancies are instructive. Ordway counts “Six men”; Clark says he took “all the men which could be Speared from the Fort” — a phrasing that suggests a fluid, larger party than Ordway’s tidy number. Either Ordway is recording the initial detail that left the fort or he is rounding for the journal; Clark, who was on the ground, gives the more elastic figure.
Clark alone records the concrete logistical detail that gives the day its physical shape: four canoes were carried roughly a mile and a half through the bottomland to the Missouri. This is exactly the kind of measurement the captains were trained to preserve and that Ordway, working from camp report rather than personal observation, omits.
The two narrators also disagree about the weather. Ordway calls the latter part of the day “pleasant.” Clark records it as “cloudy” with a hard north wind. The contradiction is not unusual in the expedition journals — Ordway wrote at the fort while Clark was out in the river bottom — and it is a reminder that weather notations in the journals are observer-specific rather than objective.
The Diplomatic Register Clark Preserves Alone
Most striking is what Ordway’s entry omits entirely: the diplomatic dimension of Clark’s day. Clark notes that he “found a number of Indians” at the canoe site and that he visited the Mandan chief, smoking a pipe with him “and Several old men.” These are not incidental details. The expedition’s relationship with the Mandan villages had been the political foundation of the winter, and Clark’s pipe-smoking on the eve of departure carries the weight of a farewell courtesy.
Ordway, recording from inside the fort, reduces this consequential afternoon to logistics. Clark, the participant, preserves both the labor and the council. The pairing illustrates a recurring pattern across the journals: when Clark is in the field, his entries combine quantitative detail (distance, number of canoes) with diplomatic observation, while Ordway’s parallel entries flatten the same day into a roster of work parties and a weather line. Read together, the two narrators recover a fuller 20 March than either provides alone.
