The entries of February 3, 1805 capture a Fort Mandan command split into two operations, each contending with the limits winter imposed on the Corps of Discovery. Meriwether Lewis remained at the post, supervising the blacksmith and confronting an engineering problem of growing urgency. William Clark, by contrast, had departed downriver with a hunting party. The differing scales and registers of their accounts — alongside John Ordway’s brief notice and Patrick Gass’s later, looser recollection — reveal how the expedition’s record-keeping fragmented when its officers were apart.
Lewis at the Fort: A Problem in Three Strata
Lewis’s entry is among the most technically detailed of the Mandan winter. He opens conventionally — “a fine day; the blacksmith again commences his opperations” — before turning to what he calls the “allarming” condition of the boat and pirogues. His description of the ice is unusually precise:
The ice which incloses them lyes in several stratas of unequal thicknesses which are seperated by streams of water. this peculiarly unfortunate because so soon as we cut through the first strata of ice the water rushes up and rises as high as the upper surface of the ice and thus creates such a debth of water as renders it impracticable to cut away the lower strata which appears firmly attatched to, and confining the bottom of the vessels.
Lewis then catalogues the failed remedies in sequence: axes alone proved insufficient; boiling water heated by hot stones failed when the local stones, which he identifies as belonging to “the calcarious genus,” burst on contact with fire. The mineralogical aside is characteristic of Lewis — even a frustrated experiment becomes an occasion for natural-history classification. He closes by announcing the “dernier resort”: iron spikes affixed to poles, paired with a windlass and an elk-skin rope already prepared. The French borrowing (“dernier resort”) signals the formal register Lewis reserves for moments of consequence.
Clark Downriver: Numbers and Meat
Clark’s entry, written retrospectively to cover the period from February 3 through his return on the 13th, operates in an entirely different mode. Where Lewis describes a single problem at length, Clark compresses ten days into a few lines of tallied results:
our provisions of meat being nearly exorsted I concluded to Decend the River on the Ice & hunt, I Set out with about 16 men 3 horses & 2 Slays Descended nearly 60 miles Killed & loaded the horses back, & made 2 pens which we filed with meat, & returned on the 13th we Killed 40 Deer, 3 Bulls 19 Elk, maney So meager that they were unfit for use
The accounting is practical: men, horses, sleighs, miles, kills, and the sober qualifier that many animals were too lean to use. Clark notes the cause — exhausted provisions — and the solution in the same breath. There is no mention of weather, ice, or the fort’s vessels. His command was a self-contained operation, and his journal reflects that separation.
Ordway and Gass: The Subordinate Record
John Ordway, posted at the fort, supplies only a sentence: “Short distance to hunt the Game is Scarce, they Shortly returned without killing any thing.” Ordway’s note refers to a local hunting attempt distinct from Clark’s larger expedition downriver, and it confirms by negative example why Clark had to travel sixty miles. Game near Fort Mandan was depleted; sustenance required distance.
Patrick Gass’s surviving text for this date is fragmentary and, as transcribed, appears to mix material from a later passage describing a bear encounter and an overset pirogue — content that belongs to the spring or summer journey rather than to February 3. This is consistent with the published Gass journal’s editorial reworking by David McKeehan, in which Gass’s original Mandan-winter entries were heavily condensed. The contrast with Lewis’s day-of, technically saturated entry underscores how much of the expedition’s granular knowledge survives only because Lewis and Clark wrote at length while their men wrote briefly or had their words rewritten.
Two Crises, One Day
Read together, the entries show the Corps confronting winter on two fronts. At the fort, Lewis works through a sequence of engineering hypotheses to free vessels frozen into layered ice. Sixty miles downriver, Clark addresses hunger directly, building meat-pens and hauling carcasses back by horse and sleigh. Ordway confirms the local scarcity that forced Clark’s departure. The day’s documentary record is thus distributed across registers — Lewis’s analytical prose, Clark’s terse ledger, Ordway’s single line — each capturing a portion of a problem none of them could solve alone.
