The 30th of March, 1805 finds the Corps of Discovery at Fort Mandan in the final stages of preparation. The keelboat is being readied to descend the Missouri with reports and specimens for President Jefferson, while the main party prepares to push upriver into unknown country. Three narrators — Sergeant John Ordway, Sergeant Patrick Gass, and Captain William Clark — record the day, and the differences among their entries illuminate how each man understood the work of journal-keeping.
The River Rising: A Measured Discrepancy
All three men note that the Missouri is rising and that ice is running, but their figures and framing differ. Ordway writes plainly:
raised 10 Inches last night, the Ice runs thick in the R. to day. The Indians Goods all put out to air. The Big Barge corked & Got ready to descend the Missouris.
Clark, writing the same observation, gives a different number and a fuller cause:
The obstickle broke away above & the ice came dow in great quantites the river rose 13 inches the last 24 hours
The three-inch discrepancy between Ordway’s ten inches and Clark’s thirteen is the kind of small variance common across the expedition’s journals, where measurements were sometimes shared, sometimes taken independently, and sometimes rounded. More telling is Clark’s attention to mechanism — the breaking of an ice jam upstream — where Ordway records only the result. Ordway’s sergeant’s-eye view stays with the practical: the goods aired, the barge caulked, the work of the day. Clark, as captain, looks for the cause behind the rise.
What Clark Sees That Others Miss
Clark’s entry for the 30th contains an ethnographic observation that neither Ordway nor Gass records. As ice cakes float past Fort Mandan, Clark watches Mandan hunters at work:
I observed extrodanary dexterity of the Indians in jumping from one Cake of ice to another, for the purpose of Catching the buffalow as they float down maney of the Cakes of ice which they pass over are not two feet Square.
This is the sort of detail that distinguishes Clark’s Fort Mandan winter writing: a willingness to watch and describe Indigenous practice with admiration. The buffalo, drowned or stranded while attempting the river crossing, were a seasonal windfall, and the Mandans’ technique — leaping between ice floes hardly two feet square — clearly impressed him. Ordway, working on the barge, evidently did not see it, or did not think it worth recording. The absence is instructive: the expedition’s record of Native life depends heavily on which narrator happened to look up from his task.
Both Clark and Ordway also note the burning plains, but here the pattern reverses. Ordway is silent on the fires; Clark gives them his fullest attention, twice in successive draft entries:
The Plains are on fire on both Sides of the river it is common for the indians to Set those Plains on fire near their village for the advantage of early Grass for the hors & as an inducement to the Buffalow to visit them
Clark recognizes the burning as deliberate land management — early grass for horses, attractant for buffalo — rather than as wildfire. The doubled entry, with the second version polished into smoother prose, shows Clark revising his field notes toward a fair-copy register.
The Gass Problem
The transcription attributed to Patrick Gass for this date is plainly out of place. Its content — a visit to the second pitch of the Great Falls, a celebratory drinking of “the last of our spirits,” dancing until nine o’clock — belongs to events of July 1805, not to Fort Mandan in March. Gass’s published journal, edited by David McKeehan in 1807, was reorganized and rewritten for a reading public, and OCR errors in subsequent reprintings have here apparently associated a later passage with the wrong date. The fragment is nonetheless useful as a register comparison: McKeehan’s Gass speaks in literary cadences (“the most beantifu though not the highest”) that contrast sharply with Ordway’s terse logbook style and Clark’s working captain’s prose. Where Ordway records that the barge is “corked & Got ready,” the printed Gass offers narrative scenes with dialogue-ready pacing — a reminder that Gass’s published voice is as much McKeehan’s as his own.
Read together, the three entries show the Corps on the cusp of its great departure: the river breaking up, the barge ready to go downstream, the plains burning, and the captains and sergeants writing in registers shaped by rank, task, and editorial afterlife.
This analysis was AI-assisted and reviewed by a human editor.
