The journal entries for March 21, 1805, capture two very different registers of expedition life at Fort Mandan in the days before departure. Sergeant John Ordway, ever the methodical logistician, records the day’s labor in a few crisp lines. Captain William Clark, by contrast, devotes his entry to a sustained passage of natural-historical observation and even a small chemical experiment — one of the more striking examples of improvised field science in the entire journals.
Ordway’s Logistical Shorthand
Ordway’s account is characteristically brief and operational. He notes the timing of Clark’s return and the disposition of the men and craft:
about 2 oClock Cap1 Clark and 4 men returned from the perogues. had carried them all to the River and left three men with them to cork and take care of them, a little Snow fell the after part of the day.
This is the sergeant’s voice in its purest form: a head count, a task assignment (“to cork and take care of them”), and a weather note. Ordway gives no hint that Clark’s overland return involved anything more than walking back to the fort. The pumice-strewn hills that so absorbed his captain are simply not part of the noncommissioned officer’s reporting brief.
Clark’s Two Drafts and a Field Experiment
Clark’s entry survives in two overlapping versions — a notebook draft and the journal proper — which together show him reworking the same observation. Both describe the same overland route, the same striking deposits, and the same furnace test. In the first version he writes:
I return on the 21st and on my return I passed on the points of the high hills S. S. where I saw an emence quantity of Pumice Stone, and evident marks of the hills being on fire I collected some Pumice Stone, burnt Stone & hard earth and put them into a furnace, the hard earth melted and glazed the other two a part of which i, e, the Hard Clay became a Pumice-Stone
The second version, dated and formalized, sharpens the geological language and the experimental result:
Saw an emence quantity of Pumice Stone on the Sides & foot of the hills and emence beds of Pumice Stone near the Tops of the hills with evident marks of the Hill haveing once been on fire, I collected Some the differnt i e Stone Pumice Stone & a hard earth and put them into a furnace the hard earth melted and glazed the others two and the hard Clay became a pumice Stone Glazed.
The two drafts together reveal Clark’s working method. The first is associative — he drifts from pumice into a digression about a snakebite plant intended for Mr. Heney and a note on Indian beadwork. The second is disciplined: he strips out the digression, rearranges the observation by elevation (“on the Sides & foot of the hills and emence beds . . . near the Tops”), and tightens the experimental conclusion. The captain is editing himself toward something closer to a scientific report.
What the Comparison Reveals
Read together, the two narrators occupy almost non-overlapping informational worlds for this date. Only one fact is shared between them — that Clark and a party returned from the pirogues — and even that detail is framed differently. Ordway places Clark’s arrival at “about 2 oClock” and accounts for the three men left behind to caulk the canoes; Clark omits the hour and the caulking detail entirely, mentioning only that the men carried “the remaining the 2 remained Canoes to the River, all except 3 left to take care & complete the Canoes.” Ordway preserves the precise labor arrangement; Clark preserves the geology.
This division of attention is typical of the Fort Mandan winter and the days surrounding departure. The enlisted journalists — Ordway here, Gass and Whitehouse on other dates — function as the expedition’s operational record, tracking men, hours, weather, and tasks. The captains, particularly when traveling apart from the main body, use their solo excursions to gather the kind of natural-historical material that the expedition’s instructions from Jefferson explicitly demanded. Clark’s furnace test on March 21 — heating pumice, burnt stone, and hard clay until the clay itself vitrified into a glazed pumice — is a small but revealing instance of how the captains tried to move from observation to causal explanation, testing in miniature the hypothesis that the Missouri’s smoking bluffs had “once been on fire.”
The day’s juxtaposition is, in that sense, emblematic: Ordway counts the canoes onto the river while Clark, a few hours earlier and a few miles away, is melting the country itself in a fire to see what it is made of.
