The events surrounding 15 February 1805 — a Sioux raid on a Corps detachment hauling meat back to Fort Mandan, and the immediate pursuit led by Captain Lewis — produced three surviving accounts that differ as much in narrative posture as in detail. William Clark, who remained at the fort, writes from the vantage of command. John Ordway marches with Lewis and records the pursuit hour by hour. Patrick Gass compresses the entire episode, including its multi-day aftermath, into a single retrospective paragraph.
Three Vantage Points on a Single Alarm
Clark’s journal carries the official weight of the post commander. He records the arrival of the dispatch riders at “10 oClock P M” the previous night and lays out the encounter with administrative precision:
about 105 Indians which they took to be Souis rushed on them and Cut their horses from the Slays, two of which they carried off in great hast, the 3rd horse was given up to the party by the intersetion of an Indian who assumd Some authority on the accasion
Clark names the four men involved — “G Drewyer Frasure, S Gutterage, & Newmon” — and notes the diplomatic machinery that followed: messengers sent to the Mandan villages, the arrival of “Big white” from the second village, and the explanation that “all the young men of the 2 Villages were out hunting, and but verry fiew guns were left.” His attention is institutional: who came, who could not, and what arms accompanied Lewis’s party of twenty-four men out the gate “at Sunrise.”
Ordway, who walked with that party, narrates from inside the column. His account preserves the kinetic texture of the raid as the dispatch riders described it:
they emediately Seized the horses cut of[f] the collars (hooping and yelling) jurked the halters from one to another through Several hands, then they jumped on two of them and rode of[f] uppon the run
Where Clark abstracts (“carried off in great hast”), Ordway dramatizes — the whooping, the halters passing through several hands, the men struggling to keep “the Gray mare which had a coalt at the Fort.” He also notes a commercial detail Clark omits: one of the stolen horses was “a fine large Gilding which belong[s] to one of the N. W. Compy tradors by the name of Mackinzie,” tying the loss to the North West Company trade network rather than treating it as solely a Corps matter.
Register and Compression
Ordway’s pursuit narrative continues with a foot-soldier’s awareness of distance and fatigue: eighteen miles to the first halt, boiled meat from a hunters’ cache, the discovery of “a Sled their which they had cut the horse out of,” and finally the cautious approach to two old Indian lodges where “we sent in a Spy but found none.” His closing observation — “Some of the mens feet were sore walking 30 odd mis on the Ice to day” — is the kind of physical detail entirely absent from Clark’s entry.
Gass, by contrast, writes well after the fact and folds the entire week into a single block. He skips the raid itself — Ordway’s hooping and yelling, Clark’s roll call of names — and picks up the pursuit already underway:
Having arrived at the place we found the savages were gone; had destroyed our meat, burnt the huts and fled into the plains.
Gass alone supplies the closing arithmetic of the expedition: hunting on “the 17th and 18th,” loading the sleds on the 19th so heavily that “fifteen men drew one and the horse the other,” and the fatigued return on the 20th. Clark’s later summary entry corroborates Gass’s outline — “Capt Lewis returned the 21st with 2400 l. of meat, haveing Killed 36 Deer & 14 Elk” — but Gass is the only narrator to convey the labor of hauling that meat home across the ice.
What Each Narrator Notices Alone
Several details survive in only one account. Clark alone records the medical vignette of a Mandan chief who “returned from Capt Lewises Party nearly blind,” together with the indigenous remedy of “jentilley Swetting the part affected by throweng Snow on a hot Stone” — snow blindness from sun on ice, a seasonal complaint Clark treats with ethnographic interest. Clark also notes the thermometer at “16° below 0” and a “verry large Red Fox” killed that day. Ordway alone preserves the moccasins found at the abandoned camp and the recovered sled. Gass alone tracks the human cost of the return march and mentions “one of our men whose feet had been a little frozen.”
Read together, the three entries demonstrate how the Corps’ documentary practice distributed observation across ranks: Clark consolidates and contextualizes, Ordway witnesses and sequences, and Gass — writing for eventual publication — compresses toward narrative shape. No single journal would suffice; the raid of 15 February exists most fully in their overlap.
