The journal entries for December 31, 1804, the expedition’s last day of its first calendar year on the Missouri, divide cleanly along a line of attention. William Clark, writing from inside Fort Mandan, produces an atmospheric and ethnographic sketch of the post itself. John Ordway and Patrick Gass, by contrast, log the centrifugal labors of the Corps: scouting timber upriver, hunting downriver. Read together, the three entries map the geography of the wintering establishment—a fortified hub with parties radiating outward in opposite directions along the frozen river.
Clark’s Atmospheric Eye
Clark’s entry is by far the longest and most observational of the three. He opens with a weather note that quickly turns into a small landscape study:
a fine Day Some wind last night which mixed the Snow and Sand in the bend of the river, which has the appearance of hillocks of Sand on the ice, which is also Covered with Sand & Snow, the feost which falls in the night continues on the earth & old Snow &c. &c.
The detail—wind-driven sand and snow forming hillocks on the river ice—is the kind of fine-grained description that Clark, despite his reputation for plainer prose than Lewis, returns to repeatedly during the Mandan winter. Neither Ordway nor Gass mentions the sand-and-snow phenomenon, a reminder that the captains’ journals frequently preserve environmental observations the enlisted men’s daybooks compress or omit entirely.
Commerce at the Forge
Clark then shifts from weather to the social life of the fort:
a Number of indians here every Day our blckSmitth mending their axes hoes &c. &c. for which the Squars bring Corn for payment
This brief notice documents one of the most important economic facts of the winter at Fort Mandan: the expedition’s blacksmith—John Shields, with Alexander Willard assisting—had become a critical node in local exchange. Mandan and Hidatsa women carried corn to the fort to pay for the repair of iron tools, and that corn would prove essential to the Corps’s survival through the cold months. Clark’s offhand register here—”&c. &c.”—understates a transaction that was, in caloric terms, keeping the expedition alive. Notably, neither Ordway nor Gass records the trade on this date, though both note it elsewhere in the winter.
Ordway and Gass: The Outward Parties
The two enlisted journalists report on detachments, not on the fort. Ordway notes a party going
up to the 2nd village of mandans in order to look in that bottom for timber to make pearogues.
This is forward-looking labor: the captains were already considering the spring, when additional pirogues or dugout canoes would be needed to ascend the upper Missouri beyond the range of the keelboat. Ordway’s spelling “pearogues” is characteristic of his orthography and matches his usage elsewhere in the winter journals.
Gass, in his characteristically terse manner, records only the destination of another detachment:
to the hunters’ Camp, which is thirty miles down the river.
The hunters’ camp—established to take advantage of game beyond the heavily hunted vicinity of the Mandan and Hidatsa villages—was a recurrent reference point in Gass’s winter entries. His distance figure of thirty miles is consistent with other expedition estimates of the camp’s location downstream toward the Heart River.
Cross-Narrator Patterns
Three patterns emerge from the day’s entries. First, register: Clark writes in expansive observational prose; Ordway in functional but fuller sentences; Gass in clipped fragments that read almost as memoranda. Second, vantage point: Clark looks at the fort and its visitors, while Ordway and Gass look outward at parties already gone. Third, complementarity rather than copying. Although Ordway’s journal is often suspected of informing Gass’s published narrative, the December 31 entries point in opposite directions along the river—upstream for timber, downstream for meat—and neither duplicates the other’s content. The captains’ journal and the sergeants’ journals on this date are best read as overlapping but distinct records, each preserving information the others let pass.
This analysis was AI-assisted and reviewed by a human editor.
