On the 26th of March, 1805, the Corps of Discovery faced one of the seasonal hazards that had shaped their winter at Fort Mandan: the breakup of the Missouri River ice. Two narrators — Sergeant John Ordway and Captain William Clark — recorded the day’s events, and the contrast between their accounts illustrates how rank, role, and audience shaped expedition record-keeping.
The Same Event, Two Registers
Clark’s entry is, characteristically, the work of a commanding officer summarizing a day for the official record. He notes the weather (“a find Day wind S. W.”), the diminished traffic from neighboring villages (“but fiew Inds visit us to day”), and the river’s rise of nine inches. Only one sentence acknowledges what must have been a dramatic afternoon:
The ice began to brake away this evening and was near distroying our Canoes as they wer decnding to the fort
Ordway, by contrast, devotes nearly his entire entry to the same incident, and his sergeant’s-eye view preserves the urgency Clark elides. Where Clark writes that the ice was “near distroying” the canoes, Ordway records the moment-by-moment scramble:
about 2 oClock they returned with the perogues, but before they had landed the Ice Started So that we had to draw them out with Speed
Ordway alone supplies the time of day, the labor involved, and the resolution — that “all hands turned out” to drag the boats up the bank, that one was carried down to the fort, and that the ice “Stoped and jamed up” before halting entirely before night. He even tracks the four pirogues that had not yet reached the fort and were pulled ashore upstream to avoid damage.
What Each Narrator Notices
The divergence is instructive. Clark, who was “prepareing to Depart” and thinking ahead to the journey upriver, frames the ice breakup as a logistical fact and a near-miss. His attention is on the river’s rise — a metric directly relevant to navigation planning — and on the diplomatic register (the absence of Indian visitors). The canoes appear chiefly as property nearly lost.
Ordway, responsible for executing the captains’ orders and presumably among the “all hands” hauling boats, records the texture of the labor itself. His repetitions — the ice “Started Several times but Stoped entirely before night” — convey the prolonged anxiety of a crew watching a frozen river decide whether to release its grip in stages or all at once. He notes that the boats “took no Injury,” a detail Clark does not bother to confirm.
Complementary Records
Neither account appears to copy from the other; the wording, sequence, and emphasis differ throughout. This is one of the cases in which the expedition’s layered journal-keeping practice pays clear dividends for later readers. Clark’s brevity establishes the day’s framework — weather, river stage, departure preparations, a brush with disaster. Ordway’s fuller narrative supplies the human scene: the 2 o’clock return of the pirogue party, the sudden movement of the ice, the rapid response, and the eventual jam that ended the threat.
Read together, the two entries also underscore how close the Corps came to losing essential watercraft on the eve of departure. The pirogues being retrieved that afternoon were among the very vessels meant to carry men, baggage, and trade goods up the Missouri in the weeks ahead. Had the ice come down even minutes earlier, or had the crew been slower to react, the expedition’s spring schedule — and possibly its westward push itself — could have been materially set back. Clark’s understated “near distroying” carries, in light of Ordway’s account, considerably more weight than its eight words suggest.
The pairing is a useful reminder that the official journal of an expedition rarely tells the whole story, and that the sergeants’ journals — Ordway’s especially — preserve operational details that the captains, writing with broader concerns in view, frequently compressed or omitted altogether.
