The journal entries for February 1, 1805, offer a compact case study in how three expedition writers — Sergeant John Ordway, Sergeant Patrick Gass, and Captain William Clark — could share a winter day at Fort Mandan and yet produce documents of remarkably different scope. All three note the meager hunting returns. Only Clark records the diplomatic encounter that, by any measure, was the day’s most consequential event.
The Shared Hunting Ledger
Ordway, writing in his characteristically terse register, reports that a hunter went a Short distance to hunt and killed a Deer
while the hunters who went out yesterday returned the weather being bad they killed nothing.
The sentence compresses two separate parties — one successful at close range, one returning empty-handed from a longer expedition — into a single utilitarian line.
Gass covers the same ground but with a slightly different temporal frame:
came home, but had killed nothing. One of the men at the fort went out a short distance, and killed a small deer. On the next day he went out and killed another deer. This and the third were cold.
Gass’s published narrative, prepared later from his field notes, telescopes February 1 into the days that follow, noting subsequent kills and the weather (This and the third were cold
). The phrase One of the men at the fort went out a short distance
closely echoes Ordway’s Short distance to hunt
— a parallel that suggests either shared observation of the same minor event or, as scholars have long noted, the sergeants’ tendency to consult one another’s records when reconstructing camp routine.
Clark, by contrast, simply notes that our hunters returnd. haveing killed only one Deer
— folding the same information into a single subordinate clause before turning to matters he considered more pressing.
The Diplomatic Encounter Only Clark Records
The most significant divergence on this date is what Ordway and Gass omit entirely. Clark devotes the bulk of his entry to a visit from a young Hidatsa (Minnetaree) war chief:
a war Chief of the Me ne tar ras Came with Some Corn requested to have a War hatchet made, & requested to be allowed to go to war against the Souis & Ricarres who had Killed a mandan Some time past
The captains refused, offered reasons, and — Clark notes with evident satisfaction — the chief verry readily assented to, and promised to open his ears to all we Said.
Clark even preserves the man’s name in two forms: Seeing Snake Mar-book, She-ah-O-ke-ah.
This is precisely the kind of intelligence the captains had been instructed to gather: relations among the Upper Missouri nations, grievances against the Sioux and Arikara, and the willingness of local leadership to defer to American counsel.
That Ordway and Gass make no mention of the visit is telling. As enlisted sergeants, they were not parties to the council. Their journals reflect what passed through the enlisted men’s quarters and the hunting parties — meat, weather, fatigue — while Clark’s reflects the captains’ diplomatic theater conducted in the officers’ room.
A Domestic Postscript
Clark closes with a remarkably human detail that neither sergeant registers:
this mans woman Set out & he prosued her, in the evening
The young war chief, having just been counseled against making war on the Sioux and Arikara, ended his day chasing a departing wife into the evening cold. Clark’s juxtaposition — formal diplomacy in the afternoon, domestic disorder at dusk — is unusual in his Fort Mandan entries, where he typically maintains a strict register of councils, distances, and weather. Whether the detail reflects amusement, ethnographic curiosity, or simple observation, it survives only because Clark, unlike his sergeants, was positioned to see it.
Patterns of Witness
The February 1 entries illustrate a consistent pattern across the Fort Mandan winter: Ordway and Gass converge on the camp’s material rhythm, often using overlapping phrasing that suggests cross-consultation, while Clark’s journal alone preserves the diplomatic and interpersonal texture of relations with the Mandan and Hidatsa villages. A reader relying solely on the sergeants would know that hunters returned with one deer. Only Clark reveals that the Corps was, on the same afternoon, actively shaping intertribal warfare on the Upper Missouri.
