The entries for March 6, 1805 from Fort Mandan offer a useful study in narrator divergence. William Clark and John Ordway both record the day, but their accounts share almost no specific content. Where Ordway, the orderly sergeant, attends to lodging visitors and the practical state of the river ice, Clark assembles a broader catalogue of diplomatic, ecological, and incidental news. Read together, the two passages reconstruct a fuller picture of late-winter routine at the fort than either provides alone.
Two Registers of Observation
Ordway opens with a brief notice of overnight guests and morning visitors:
Several of the Grossvantars Savages Stayed with us last night, a nomber of the Mandanes came this morning with corn, the Water has run over the Ice So that it is difficult crossing the river.
His sentence is functional and bounded — who slept at the fort, who arrived at dawn, what the river is doing. The detail about water flooding over the ice is the kind of practical hazard a sergeant tracking movement and supply would naturally record. Notably, Ordway is the only one of the two to mention the Hidatsa (“Grossvantars”) guests staying the night, a piece of information absent from Clark’s longer entry.
Clark, by contrast, ranges much more widely:
a Cloudy morning & Smokey all Day from the burning of the plains, which was Set on fire by the Minetarries for an early crop of Grass as an endusement for the Buffalow to feed on
This is one of the more significant ethnographic notes from the Fort Mandan winter. Clark not only observes the smoke but explains its cause and purpose — Hidatsa prairie burning to encourage early grass and attract bison. Ordway makes no mention of the smoke at all, despite its presumably blanketing the area “all Day.” The omission underscores a recurring pattern in the journals: Clark routinely captures environmental and Indigenous land-management details that pass unremarked in the enlisted men’s records.
Diplomacy, Accidents, and the River
Clark continues with a dense sequence of news items: stolen horses recovered from the Assiniboine and returned to the Hidatsa the previous day; a visit from Oh-harh, identified as the second chief of the lower Hidatsa village; the carpentry accident in which Shannon cut his foot with the adze while working on a pirogue; and the dispatch of George Drouillard and Joseph Gravelines (“George & Graviline”) to the village. He closes with a one-line river note:
the river rise a little to day-
Here the two narrators briefly converge. Both men are watching the Missouri, anticipating the breakup that will free the boats and launch the next leg of the expedition. But their framings differ. Ordway describes the river as an obstacle — water over ice, hard to cross. Clark records it as a measurement — a slight rise. The contrast is characteristic: Ordway tends to describe immediate physical conditions encountered by the party, while Clark logs incremental data points that, accumulated across weeks, will let the captains judge when departure is possible.
The Shannon injury is another item Ordway omits. George Shannon, the youngest member of the corps, appears repeatedly in Clark’s notes throughout the winter, and the adze wound is the kind of small medical event the captains tracked closely as the party prepared its pirogues. That Ordway does not mention it suggests either that he wrote his entry early in the day, before the accident, or simply that he did not consider minor injuries within his reporting scope.
Cross-Narrator Patterns
March 6 is not a day on which Ordway appears to be drawing from Clark or vice versa — the entries are too dissimilar in content to suggest copying in either direction. Instead, the day illustrates the independence of the two journals during the Fort Mandan period. Ordway’s brevity should not be mistaken for inattention; his entry preserves the Hidatsa overnight stay that Clark does not record. Clark’s expansiveness, meanwhile, reflects his role as a co-commander synthesizing diplomatic, ethnographic, and logistical information. Used together, the two entries offer complementary angles on a single smoky Wednesday at the fort: the prairie burning, the returned horses, the visiting chief, the wounded carpenter, and the slowly rising river that would, within weeks, carry the expedition west.
This analysis was AI-assisted and reviewed by a human editor.
