The journal entries for 29 March 1805 capture Fort Mandan in a moment of suspended motion: the ice on the Missouri has finally halted, the boats are being readied, and the Corps of Discovery stands days away from pushing upriver into territory unknown to them. Three narrators — Sergeant John Ordway, Sergeant Patrick Gass, and Captain William Clark — each record the day, but their accounts diverge sharply in scope, register, and observational priority.
Three Scales of Attention
Ordway’s entry is the briefest and the most quantitative. He notes only a measurement of precipitation and the ongoing labor of the camp:
22 Inches in 22 hours, we continue gitting ready to Start up the River.
The terseness is characteristic of Ordway’s sergeant’s-log style — a running tally of weather data and collective activity (“we continue gitting ready”), with little narrative elaboration. The figure of twenty-two inches in twenty-two hours, almost certainly referring to a snow or rain accumulation reading, suggests Ordway was keeping a meteorological register of the kind the captains expected from their non-commissioned officers.
Clark, by contrast, lifts his eyes from the camp itself to the river and the surrounding Mandan community. His entry attends to causes and consequences:
The ice has Stoped running owing to Som obstickle above, repare the Boat & Perogues, and prepareing to Set out but few Indians visit us to day they are now attending on the river bank to Catch the floating Buffalow
Clark offers what Ordway does not: an explanatory hypothesis (“owing to Som obstickle above”) and an ethnographic detail of considerable importance — the Mandan practice of harvesting drowned buffalo carcasses carried downstream by the spring breakup. This observation, casually inserted, is one of the more vivid documentations of a seasonal subsistence strategy that other expedition members elsewhere describe with greater astonishment. Clark renders it matter-of-factly, as an explanation for the unusual quiet at the fort.
Gass and the Problem of the Composite Entry
The Gass material presented for this date is the most textually complex, in part because the surviving page (as transcribed via OCR) bleeds across multiple days. The 29 March content proper concerns weather and a reconnaissance trip:
rain in the morning ; but a fine forenoon after it. Captain Lewis and a hunter went down the river about 7 miles, to see a very large spring which rises out of the bank of the Missouri on the south side. In the afternoon there was another heavy shower of rain, and after it a fine evening.
Where Ordway flattens the day into a single measurement and Clark frames it through Mandan activity, Gass narrates it as a sequence of meteorological turns punctuated by an excursion. His attention to Lewis’s seven-mile trip to view a large spring is not echoed in either Ordway or Clark for this date — a reminder that Gass, whose published 1807 journal was the first expedition account to reach print, frequently preserved small expeditionary side-trips that the captains’ own journals omitted or deferred.
The remainder of the Gass page drifts forward into entries datable to early April — including the well-known flash-flood episode in which Sacagawea (“the Indian woman and child”) nearly perished in a ravine, and the later attack on a brown bear on an island. These episodes are not from 29 March and reflect the typesetting of the printed Gass volume rather than the day under analysis. The OCR artifact is itself instructive: it illustrates how Gass’s published text, mediated by editor David McKeehan, packages multiple days into continuous narrative paragraphs in a way that the manuscript journals of Clark and Ordway do not.
Register and Audience
Read together, the three entries display the stratified documentary culture of the expedition. Ordway writes for the captains, producing data. Clark writes as the expedition’s principal field observer, integrating environment, indigenous practice, and logistics into a single sentence. Gass — or rather Gass-as-edited — writes for an eventual reading public, with a fuller narrative arc and a taste for incident. None of the three contradicts the others; rather, each reveals what his role and his intended reader led him to record. On the eve of departure from Fort Mandan, the same day looks like a rainfall total, a riverbank tableau of Mandan hunters, and a scenic excursion to a spring, depending on whose pen one consults.
