The journal entries of February 19, 1805, offer a striking case study in how three members of the Lewis and Clark Expedition could occupy the same chronological moment yet record radically different fields of attention. Patrick Gass and John Ordway are both narrating events of the recent hunting excursion downriver, while William Clark, writing from inside the fort, captures the day’s domestic and diplomatic rhythm. Read together, the entries illuminate not only the division of labor at Fort Mandan but also the divergent register and scope each narrator brought to his journal.
The Hunting Party in Two Registers
Gass and Ordway were both members of the party detached to recover the meat cached downriver, and their entries cover overlapping ground. Yet the texture of their accounts differs sharply. Gass writes in a compressed, almost ledger-like summary mode, telescoping multiple days into a single retrospective passage:
On the 7th we encamped in a bottom on the south side of the Missouri, and the next day turned out to hunt. We killed 10 elk and 18 deer, and remained there all night. On the 9th we built a pen to secure our meat from the wolves, which are very numerous here.
Gass’s tally is the work of a sergeant accounting for provisions: numbers of animals, dates, the practical detail of a wolf-proof pen. He even notes, almost in passing, a piece of social news that Clark and Ordway omit on this date — that during the party’s absence “one of our interpreter’s wives had in our absence made an addition to our number,” a reference to the birth of Sacagawea’s son Jean Baptiste Charbonneau on February 11.
Ordway, by contrast, narrates the return journey itself in close, sequential detail:
we made ready and loaded the two Sleds with meat the Smallest drawn by the Gray horse, the other drawn by 15 of the party on the Ice loaded heavy, about 9 oClock we Set off & proceeded on verry well a fiew miles saw a Deer hanging up at the edge of the River which the hunters had killed, we took it on the sled and proceeded on about 8 miles halted took dinner on a broiled Deer, went on about 4 miles further and camped at a timbered bottom.
Where Gass abstracts, Ordway particularizes. He notes the precise hauling arrangement — one sled drawn by the gray horse, the other dragged by fifteen men on the ice — the hour of departure, the distances between halts, and even the broiled-deer dinner. Ordway’s entry is the journal of a man inside the experience; Gass’s is the journal of a man tabulating it after the fact. The two accounts are complementary rather than contradictory, and neither shows clear textual borrowing from the other on this date.
Clark Inside the Fort
Clark’s entry stands apart in both length and subject. While his men struggled with loaded sleds on the river ice, he recorded the day from the captain’s vantage at the fort:
a fine Day visited by Several of the Mandans to day, our Smiths are much engaged mending and makeing Axes for the Indians for which we get Corn
In a single sentence Clark captures one of the most important economic relationships of the Fort Mandan winter — the trade of blacksmithing services for Mandan corn, an exchange that helped sustain the expedition through the lean months. The brevity is characteristic of Clark’s winter entries, which tend toward terse weather notes and summary statements of fort activity. What Clark sees is the diplomatic and provisioning hub; what Ordway sees is the labor of getting meat home; what Gass sees is the cumulative result of days of hunting.
Cross-Narrator Patterns
Several patterns emerge. First, the absence of Lewis on this date — he is not journaling in this period — leaves Clark as the sole captain’s voice, and his terseness contrasts with the fuller narratives of the enlisted men. Second, Gass and Ordway, both sergeants keeping required journals, divide the same expedition between them: Gass favors the retrospective summary, Ordway the day-by-day march log. Third, only Gass mentions the birth at the fort, a reminder that significant events sometimes appear in only one of the surviving journals and that no single narrator’s silence should be read as an event’s absence. Together, the three entries reconstruct a fuller February day than any one of them records alone.
