The entries for 22 March 1805 capture a diplomatic ceremony conducted in the closing weeks of the expedition’s winter at Fort Mandan. A second-tier chief from the Hidatsa (Minetarree, or ‘Grossvantars’) villages arrived in company with two North West Company traders, François-Antoine Larocque and Charles McKenzie, and was formally invested with a medal and clothing by the captains. Both Sergeant John Ordway and Captain William Clark describe the event, but their entries diverge in framing, register, and the details each narrator chooses to preserve.
Parallel Accounts, Divergent Emphases
Ordway’s entry is brisk and inventory-minded. He situates the day within a stream of routine traffic at the fort — trade in corn from the surrounding villages — before noting the visit:
a nomber of the Grossvantars Savages came to visit our officers with Mr McKinzey & Mr Larouck. our Captains made a chief & Gave him a meddel and an artillery coat a Shirt knife &. C.
The sergeant’s phrasing — ‘our Captains made a chief’ — reflects the enlisted man’s external view of the ceremony as an act performed by the officers, and his enumeration of the gifts (medal, artillery coat, shirt, knife) reads like a quartermaster’s notation. Ordway closes with a brief unrelated entry on Rives (Reed) returning a pirogue.
Clark, by contrast, writes with the formality of an officer responsible for the diplomatic record. He identifies the visitor specifically as ‘the 2nd Chief of the Grand Village of the Minetarrees’ and frames the gift-giving as official acknowledgment: ‘we gave a medal & Some Clothes acknowledging him as a 2d Chief.’ Where Ordway sees a transaction, Clark sees a recognition of rank within an ongoing system of intertribal hierarchy that the captains were attempting to map and influence.
The Dance, the Speech, and What Each Narrator Notices
Both writers mention that the chief stayed to watch the men dance — a recurring evening amusement at Fort Mandan that doubled as cultural display for visiting delegations. Clark generalizes the practice as ‘common amusement with the men,’ suggesting his readership may have been unfamiliar with it, while Ordway, an insider to that amusement, does not bother to explain it.
Clark’s entry then bleeds into the following day (23 March), where he records additional ceremonial substance that Ordway omits entirely:
we gave a Medal Some Clothes and wampoms to the 2 Chief and Delivered a Speach, which they all appeared well pleased with
The ‘Speach’ — a formal address that was a standard component of the captains’ diplomatic toolkit — appears nowhere in Ordway’s account. Nor does the cryptic notation that closes Clark’s 23 March entry: ‘Mr. Jessomme displeased.’ René Jusseaume, the expedition’s resident interpreter among the Mandan, evidently took offense at something during the proceedings, but Clark does not elaborate. Ordway, writing from outside the officers’ circle, would not have been privy to such interpreter politics.
Clark also registers a meteorological detail Ordway misses: ‘Some few Drops of rain this evening for the first time this Winter.’ For a captain attentive to climate as both scientific data and travel intelligence, the first rainfall after a Plains winter was worth noting. Ordway, whose journal that day is dominated by the ceremonial visit and the pirogue, does not mark it.
Register and Audience
The cross-narrator comparison illustrates a familiar pattern in the Fort Mandan journals. Clark writes with one eye on Jefferson and the official record: he names ranks, identifies tribal subdivisions (‘Grand Village of the Minetarrees,’ ‘Bigbellies’), records speeches, and tracks weather. Ordway writes for a more domestic audience, cataloguing goods, naming the traders by familiar phonetic spellings (‘McKinzey,’ ‘Larouck’), and using the blanket term ‘Savages’ that recurs throughout his journal. Neither account contradicts the other; together they show how a single diplomatic afternoon at Fort Mandan registered differently depending on where the writer stood in the chain of command — and what he believed posterity, or his own memory, would later need.
