The entries for January 25, 1805, offer a compact case study in how three members of the Corps of Discovery filtered the same day through different priorities. Patrick Gass, John Ordway, and William Clark all write from Fort Mandan during the depth of the Missouri winter, and all three touch on the laborious work of cutting the boats free from the river ice. Yet only Clark, the senior officer present at the writing desk that day, records the diplomatic event that would have larger consequences for the expedition’s understanding of Northern Plains trade networks.
Convergence on the Day’s Labor
Gass, the carpenter-sergeant whose journal often reads as a workman’s log, reduces the day to a single phrase about the ongoing struggle with the frozen Missouri:
ice, which we find a tedious business.
The fragment is characteristic of Gass’s terse register. Where his fellow sergeant Ordway tends to itemize tasks, Gass renders judgment — the work is tedious. Ordway, by contrast, supplies the parallel detail Gass omits, noting the men were:
employed at cutting and Splitting coal wood & Setting up the pit &. C.
Ordway’s reference to “coal wood” and a “pit” points to charcoal production, almost certainly in support of the blacksmith’s forge that had become a key item of trade with the Mandan and Hidatsa villages. His characteristic “&. C.” (et cetera) signals that the labor extended beyond what he chose to enumerate. Clark folds both threads together in a single sentence: the men were “employ’d in Cutting the Boat out of the ice, and Collecting Coal wood.” Clark’s phrasing functions almost as a synthesis of the two sergeants’ separate emphases — boats and fuel, ice and forge — though there is no evidence that Clark was copying from either subordinate’s journal on this date. More likely, all three men were drawing on a common pool of observable activity around the fort.
What Only Clark Records
The most consequential information for the day appears nowhere in the sergeants’ entries. Clark alone notes the arrival of an Assiniboine trading party at the Mandan villages:
we are informed of the arrival of a Band of Asniboins at the Villages with the Grand Cheif of those Tribes call the (Fee de petite veau) to trade
The chief’s name as Clark renders it — Fee de petite veau — appears to be a phonetic approximation of a French trader designation, likely a garbled form of Fils du petit veau (“Son of the Little Calf”). Clark further records that one of the expedition’s interpreters and one enlisted man set out for the “Big Belley Camp opposit the Island,” referring to the Hidatsa (Gros Ventres of the Missouri). This dispatch suggests the captains were actively gathering intelligence on the Assiniboine visit and the trade dynamics it represented — Assiniboine bands functioned as middlemen in the British-linked fur trade out of the Assiniboine and Saskatchewan rivers, and their appearance at the Knife River villages had implications for the diplomatic posture Lewis and Clark were trying to cultivate.
Register and Responsibility
The asymmetry between the entries reflects a division of journalistic responsibility within the Corps. Gass and Ordway, as sergeants, were under standing orders to keep journals, but their attention naturally settled on the work parties they supervised or participated in. Clark, sharing command, took it upon himself to record the political and intertribal information that flowed into the fort — information often relayed through the interpreters René Jusseaume and Toussaint Charbonneau, or carried by Mandan and Hidatsa visitors. The pattern visible on January 25 — sergeants logging labor, captain logging diplomacy — recurs throughout the Fort Mandan winter and helps explain why Clark’s journal remains the indispensable source for the expedition’s relations with the surrounding Native nations.
Read together, the three entries also correct any temptation to treat a single journal as the day’s full record. Without Ordway, the charcoal pit goes unmentioned; without Gass, the men’s own assessment of their labor as tedious is lost; without Clark, the Assiniboine chief and the dispatch to the Hidatsa camp vanish entirely. The cross-narrator reading restores a fuller Friday at Fort Mandan: cold, smoky with charcoal fires, and quietly busy with the diplomatic traffic of the Northern Plains.
