Voice: The Sergeant’s Plain Hand
John Ordway writes like a sergeant: punctual, inclusive, and almost aggressively unliterary. Where Lewis reaches for sublimity and Clark for command, Ordway reaches for the day’s tally. His sentences are short, additive, and tethered to the verbs set out, proceeded on, passed, halted, camped. A typical day on the lower Missouri (1804-05-27) begins and ends in the same syntactic groove:
Arrived at the Mouth of the Gasgonade River at 5 0. C. P. M. on S Side Shannon killed a Deer encamped on Island opposite to the Mouth of the River, which is a handsome place, the Soil is good, the Country pleasant &C. arms & ammunition Inspected.
That last clause — arms & ammunition Inspected — is pure Ordway. It is a sergeant’s habit of mind: the day is not closed until the inventory is closed. The phrase “&C.” appears so often it functions almost as a comma, a small shrug that lets him stop describing a thing he has not the leisure to render. “the Soil is good, the Country pleasant &C” is his standard formula for a landscape worth noting but not worth lingering over.
His spelling is wonderfully phonetic and consistent in its inconsistency: eairly, verry, nomber, pleanty, enofe, moggisins, cannos, perogue, Sammon, commass, chappalell. He spells buffaloe, buffalow, and buffalow within a few weeks of each other (1804-09-23, 1805-04-21). The spellings are not careless so much as oral — he writes the way the Hampshire-born enlistee likely spoke. He almost never corrects himself.
Omissions: What the Sergeant Doesn’t Say
Ordway’s silences are as telling as his entries. He very rarely registers personal feeling. When the expedition reaches the Pacific and votes on a winter site (1805-11-14), he records only that they are “in this disagreeable harbour with nothing but pounded Sammon to eat,” with no flicker of awe at having reached the ocean. His entry for the day Sacagawea reunited with her brother Cameahwait (1805-08-19) is dominated by trout, beaver traps, and pack saddles:
we caught a nomber of fine Trout covred all over with black spots in Stead of red. in the afternoon the hunters returned to Camp & had killed and brought in 2 deer, light Showers of rain this even8
The momentous human reunion that fills Lewis’s pages goes unmentioned. He does the same on 1805-11-28 when Clark is exploring for a winter site on the south shore: “Several men went out to hunt but killed nothing hard rain all day.” That is the entire entry.
He skips ethnographic theorizing. Where Lewis dilates on Indian customs, Ordway typically registers behavior in passing: at the Mandan villages on 1804-12-15 he describes a hoop-and-pole game in unusual detail but admits, “I do not understand how they count the game.” That admission — frank, incurious — is characteristic. He notes Rivet dancing on his head at Fort Mandan (1804-11-27) the way he notes a deer killed: as a fact, not a curiosity.
He almost never moralizes. When the captains take a Clatsop canoe “in lieu of 6 Elk which they stole from us this winter” (1806-03-22), Ordway records the act without the editor’s later discomfort. Even Lewis’s fight with the Blackfeet on the Marias (1806-07-26) reaches Ordway’s page as logistics — wagons stuck in mud, a buffalo killed, the cache opened — because he was not present and treats secondhand violence as just another thing to file.
Patterns: The Bookkeeping Mind
Four recurring categories structure nearly every Ordway entry:
1. Weather and wind. Almost every entry opens with weather. “a Clear and pleasant morning, but verry chilly & cold” (1805-04-21); “foggy but fair day” (1804-06-14); “Snowed Slowly untill 12 oClock” (1804-10-21). The Fort Clatsop entries become almost comic in their meteorological monotony — 1806-02-14 is, in full: “rain through the course of the day.”
2. The hunters’ tally. Ordway is the expedition’s most reliable game ledger. Names and numbers recur with sergeant-like accuracy: “G Drewyer killed 2 Deer and R. Fields killed one Deer … Cap1 Lewis killed a Deer & Turkey … Collins killed 3 Deer in the course of this Day” (1804-06-24). At Fort Clatsop on 1806-01-27 he reports, with the precision of a quartermaster, “Shannon … had killed five Elk and informed us that R. Feilds had killed three Elk and Labuche 2 Elk.” When the men eat a raven on New Year’s Day “to Satisfy their hunger” (1806-01-03), the note is a pure provisioning fact.
3. Mileage and side of river. He is obsessive about N. Side and S. Side, L.S. and S.S., and the day’s miles. “we Came 25 miles to day and Camp at the mouth of a creek named Warners R. on the N. Side” (1805-05-10). This bookkeeping turns his journal into the expedition’s most useful navigational backup.
4. The work of the day. Ordway records labor with care that the captains often skip. The construction of Fort Mandan (1804-11-08, 1804-11-17, 1804-12-24), the failed attempt to free the boats with hot stones that “flew in peaces as soon as they Got hot” (1805-01-29), the raising of the barge with a doubled rope and windlass (1805-02-26), the shelling of corn, the making of pack saddles, the trying out of “5 gallons of bears oil” for the mountain crossing (1806-05-15) — the expedition’s hand-labor lives chiefly in his pages.
Patterns: How the Voice Changes Across the Arc
Ordway’s prose evolves subtly with the journey’s geography.
Lower Missouri (1804, May–August). The early entries are tidy, almost touristic. He notes “a great nomber of French people Come to See the Boat” at St. Charles (1804-05-15) and the painted “Pickture of the Devil” on the river bluffs (1804-06-05). He is alert to the French-Canadian voyageur world — meeting traders’ canoes “loaded with Peltry” — and to settlement: an old French trading house, an old Kansas village.
Fort Mandan winter (1804–05). Entries shrink dramatically. Many are a single line: 1805-01-11 reads simply “accured.” 1805-01-20: “considerable corn.” The cold and routine collapse his prose to its essence — a daily check-in. Yet this is also where his ethnographic eye flickers most, in the long Mandan game description (1804-12-15) and the dance at the second village (1805-01-02).
Upper Missouri (Spring–Summer 1805). The entries lengthen and the country opens. Ordway grows more painterly, in his way: “the Game is gitting so pleanty and tame in this country that Some of the party clubbed them out of their way” (1805-05-10). He records the captains’ renaming of the rivers (Jefferson, Madison, Gallatin, Wisdom, Philanthropy, Philosophy) on 1805-08-10 with characteristic neutrality, as though copying an order.
Bitterroots and Columbia (Fall 1805). Hardship enters the prose. On 1805-09-15, climbing the Lolo Trail:
Some of our horses fell backwards and roled 20 or 30 feet among the rocks, but did not kill them … we travvelled untill after dark in hopes to find water, but could not find any. we found Some Spots of Snow so we Camped on the top of the Mountain and melted Some Snow.
His sentences here lengthen and run together; the additive style suits exhaustion.
Fort Clatsop (Winter 1805–06). The entries again shrink. 1806-03-04 is a single fragment: “tinues all this day.” 1806-02-23 admits illness with characteristic understatement: “are now Sick I think that I and three others have the Enfluenzey.” That “I think” is one of the few moments of personal interiority in the entire journal.
Return journey (1806). Ordway’s prose grows confident and sometimes adventurous. His near-disaster among the sawyers on 1806-08-04, where he and Willard ride through driftwood snags by moonlight, is the closest he comes to first-person narrative drama:
I being in the bow of the canoe took my oar and hailed the bow first one way and the other So as to clear the Sawyers and run through Safe and paddled the canoe to Shore.
It is still without ornament — but here, finally, the sergeant lets I do something.
Comparisons: Ordway Against the Other Journals
Set beside Lewis, Ordway is the anti-rhapsodist. Lewis on the Great Falls writes pages of sublimity; Ordway on the same stretch records that the captains’ interpreter’s wife is “verry Sick, one of the men a light feaver,” and that they made ten miles (1805-06-14). Set beside Clark, he is less commanding and more repetitive — Clark’s terse field notes have authority; Ordway’s have persistence. Set beside Gass, whose published journal is more polished, Ordway is rougher in spelling but often fuller in the day’s labor. He is, more reliably than any of them, the man who wrote every day.
His footnoted glosses occasionally borrow from the captains — the Mandan One Eyed (Le Borgne) note on 1805-03-16, the renaming of the rivers — but the comparisons more often reveal what Ordway uniquely supplies: the construction work, the men’s names beside their kills, the daily mileage, the labor of portages and pack saddles. When the editor of his journal compares Ordway and Gass on the Arikara (1804-10-12), Ordway’s plain note that they were “both pore & Durtey” stands beside Gass’s “the best looking Indians I have ever seen” — a reminder that Ordway records first impressions without the rhetorical flourish that invites contradiction.
What emerges across 750 entries is a voice without ego, almost without adjective, but with an unwavering daily presence. Ordway is the expedition’s bookkeeper of weather, distance, game, and work. He misses the cosmic moments — and yet, because he never misses a day, he is the only narrator from whom one can reconstruct the texture of ordinary expedition time: the wind from the N.W., the deer killed by Drewyer, the twenty miles made, the camp on the S. Side, the arms and ammunition inspected, &C.
