The entries of February 5, 1805 capture Fort Mandan operating as a small industrial outpost on the upper Missouri. Two of the three narrators present — Meriwether Lewis and Sergeant John Ordway — focus on the same scene: Mandan and Hidatsa visitors arriving at the fort to exchange corn for the labor of the expedition’s blacksmith. Patrick Gass, by contrast, is writing retrospectively about a hunting excursion, and his entry illuminates the other half of the winter economy: the steady accumulation of game.
Parallel Observations of the Blacksmith Trade
Ordway’s brief note establishes the bare transaction. He writes that
the Coal being ready for the blacksmith to work the Savages bring corn to have their war axes made & to get Scrapers to dress their buffaloe Robes with &. C.
The sergeant’s register is functional — he names the goods (corn), the services (war axes, hide scrapers), and moves on. Lewis, writing the same day, opens with nearly identical content but expands it into something closer to ethnography:
visited by many of the natives who brought a considerable quanty of corn in payment for the work which the blacksmith had done for them
Where Ordway stops, Lewis continues for several hundred words. He is fascinated — and faintly critical — of the design of the battle axe the Mandans favor, and devotes most of his entry to a meticulous description of its proportions, weight, and use on horseback. He notes the blade is
from 7 to nine inches in length and from 43/4, to 6 Inches on it’s edge
and judges the form impractical: the great length of the blade of this ax, added to the small size of the handle renders a stroke uncertain and easily avoided.
He even sketches an older variant resembling the blade of an espontoon, sometimes purforated with two three or more small circular holes
for ornament.
The contrast in register is characteristic. Ordway, as enlisted journal-keeper, often supplies the skeleton of a day’s events; Lewis, when he chooses to write at all during the Fort Mandan winter, supplies analytical depth. The overlap on February 5 — both men noting corn-for-ironwork — confirms the centrality of that exchange to the Corps’ survival, while Lewis’s digression on weapon design demonstrates his Enlightenment-era impulse to catalogue and evaluate Indigenous material culture.
Gass and the Other Economy
Gass’s entry for the date is a different kind of document altogether. Rather than reporting on February 5 in particular, he compresses a multi-day hunting expedition into a single retrospective summary. He records killing
10 elk and 18 deer
building a pen to protect the carcasses, and noting in passing that
one of our interpreter’s wives had in our absence made an ADDITION to our number.
This oblique reference — set off in small capitals — is to the birth of Jean Baptiste Charbonneau, son of Sacagawea, an event Lewis treats more directly elsewhere. Gass’s understated phrasing is striking: where Lewis catalogues axe-blades to the quarter-inch, Gass folds a child’s birth into the same paragraph as horseshoeing and wolf-proofing a meat cache.
Two Currencies, Two Voices
Read together, the three entries map the dual basis of the expedition’s winter. Iron flowing out of the forge purchased corn from the villages; rifles in the hands of hunting parties brought in elk and deer that had to be defended from wolves. Lewis and Ordway document the first; Gass documents the second. The fact that Gass writes in summary rather than daily form on this date — a pattern that recurs in his published narrative — also reflects his role as a working sergeant rather than a commanding officer with the leisure to compose at length.
No narrator on February 5 appears to be copying another. Ordway and Lewis share subject matter because they share a vantage point at the fort, but their phrasing diverges sharply. Gass’s geographic separation produces a wholly independent record. The result is an unusually well-triangulated day: the Corps’ commerce, its industry, and its hunting all visible through three distinct hands.
