The journal entries for 13 March 1805, recorded near the end of the expedition’s winter at Fort Mandan, offer an instructive contrast in narrative register and observational reach. Both Sergeant John Ordway and Captain William Clark note the arrival of a clerk from the rival North West Company, but the two accounts diverge sharply in scope. Where Ordway delivers a single sentence of social notation, Clark layers commercial diplomacy, river conditions, Indigenous diplomacy, and the labor of the expedition’s blacksmiths into a compressed paragraph.
Two Names, One Visitor — or Two?
The most immediate cross-narrator puzzle is the identity of the visiting trader. Ordway records the caller as a Mr. Larouck:
Mr Larouck one of the N. W. Compy tradors came to See our officers &. C.
Clark, writing the same day, names a different man entirely:
visited by Mr. Mckinsey one of the Clerks of the N W Companey
The discrepancy is characteristic of the Fort Mandan winter, when British traders from the Assiniboine posts — including François-Antoine Larocque and Charles McKenzie — moved frequently between the Mandan and Hidatsa villages and the American garrison. Both men are documented visitors to the fort during this period, and it is plausible that each narrator recorded a different caller on the same day, or that one sergeant’s memory blurred two recent visits. Ordway’s spelling “Larouck” reflects his consistent phonetic approach to French names, while Clark’s “Mckinsey” likewise renders McKenzie by ear. Neither narrator copies from the other here; the divergence in names suggests independent composition rather than the shared phrasing that sometimes appears in the enlisted men’s journals.
What Clark Sees That Ordway Does Not
Beyond the visitor’s name, Clark’s entry opens a window onto the full texture of the day that Ordway’s brief notation closes. Clark observes that the Missouri is beginning to rise — an early signal of the spring breakup that would soon free the boats and dictate the expedition’s departure. He registers the diplomatic atmosphere as well, noting that:
maney Inds. here to day all anxiety for war axes
The phrase compresses a significant moment in the expedition’s economy. Throughout the winter, the captains had directed John Shields and William Bratton to forge iron tools — particularly battle-axes of a distinctive Hidatsa pattern — in exchange for the corn that fed the party. Clark’s note that the smiths have:
not an hour of Idle time to Spear
indicates that demand was peaking just as the expedition prepared to move on. The “anxiety” of the visiting Indians for these axes is not merely commercial; it reflects the Mandan and Hidatsa awareness that the American forge would soon be gone, and with it a unique source of high-quality ironwork in the upper Missouri trade network.
Ordway’s silence on all of this is informative. As a sergeant, his journal during the Fort Mandan winter tends toward terse social and meteorological notes, while Clark — with command responsibility for provisioning and diplomacy — registers the commercial and political stakes of each visit. The same day yields, in effect, two different documents: one a logbook entry, the other a situation report.
Register and Routine
The wind direction Clark notes (“wind S W”) and the rising river situate the day within the meteorological record the captains kept systematically that winter. Ordway, by contrast, omits weather entirely on this date, though he frequently includes it elsewhere. The contrast underscores how even on quiet days at Fort Mandan, the expedition’s documentary output operated on multiple levels simultaneously — the captains tracking environment, labor, and intertribal politics, while the sergeants logged the social rhythms of a fort that, in its final weeks, hosted a steady traffic of British traders and Indigenous customers waiting for the smiths to finish one more axe.
