The entries for January 28, 1805 from Sergeant John Ordway and Captain William Clark cover the same Fort Mandan winter day, but they illuminate different facets of garrison life. Both men focus first on the laborious effort to free the expedition’s frozen vessels from the Missouri ice — a task that had occupied the party for several days. Yet where Ordway’s entry confines itself almost entirely to that single problem, Clark’s broader purview captures Mandan visitors at the forge, a recovering patient, and a newly ailing interpreter.
Parallel Accounts of a Frozen Boat
Ordway, writing in the technical register of a working sergeant, describes the mechanics of the operation:
cutting the Ice from round the Barge. Got large prizes [pries] & attempted to Shake hir loose but found considerable more cutting or other means [necessary].
His vocabulary is that of a man who has handled the levers himself. The detail of “large prizes” — heavy pry-poles — and the candid admission that the effort failed without “more cutting or other means” reflect a non-commissioned officer’s attention to the physical particulars of labor.
Clark compresses the same episode into a single clause:
attempt to cut through the ice &c get our Boat and Canoo out without Suckcess
The captain’s phrasing is summary rather than procedural. He names two craft (the keelboat and a canoe) where Ordway names only the barge, and he registers the outcome — “without Suckcess” — without dwelling on technique. The contrast is characteristic of the journals more broadly: Ordway frequently preserves the texture of fatigue duty, while Clark records the same labor as one item among the day’s command concerns.
What Only Clark Records
Beyond the boats, Clark’s entry opens a window onto the social and medical life of the post that Ordway’s silence entirely conceals. He notes:
Several Indians here wishing to get war hatchets made this shape
This brief line points to the active blacksmithing trade that had become, by late January 1805, one of the expedition’s principal means of obtaining corn from the Mandan and Hidatsa villages. The captains had set the smiths John Shields and Alexander Willard to work producing battle-axes on Indigenous specifications — a trade that would be recorded with greater elaboration in Lewis’s later entries. That Clark mentions it almost in passing suggests how routine such commissions had become.
Clark also tracks the health of the party and its dependents:
the man Sick yesterday is getting well Mr. Jessome our interpeter was taken verry unwell this evening
The recovering man is unnamed, but the new patient — René Jusseaume, the resident trader who served as one of the expedition’s Mandan-language interpreters — is identified specifically. Jusseaume’s illness mattered operationally: with Toussaint Charbonneau’s wife Sacagawea soon to give birth and diplomatic exchanges with the villages ongoing, the loss of an interpreter even temporarily was a command-level concern. Ordway, who did not share Clark’s responsibility for personnel, omits the matter entirely.
Register and Responsibility
The day’s two surviving entries thus form a useful pair for studying how rank and role shaped journal-keeping at Fort Mandan. Ordway writes as a participant in one task; Clark writes as a supervisor surveying many. Ordway’s spelling of “prizes” for pries and his frank confession of failure reveal a witness close to the work. Clark’s compressed boat reference, his note on hatchet-making, and his clinical attention to who is sick and who is recovering reveal the captain’s habit of cataloguing the day’s command information in a single dense paragraph.
Notably, neither narrator copies the other. The boat episode is rendered in distinct vocabulary — “Barge” versus “Boat and Canoo,” “Shake hir loose” versus “cut through the ice” — confirming that on this date the two journals were composed independently rather than transcribed from a shared source. The mild weather Clark records (“warm day”) may explain why the ice-cutting was attempted at all, even as it ultimately proved insufficient to free the vessels.
This analysis was AI-assisted and reviewed by a human editor prior to publication.
