By late March 1805, the Corps of Discovery stood on the threshold of its most consequential leg. The journals of William Clark and Sergeant John Ordway for March 25 capture a Fort Mandan in motion: ice yielding on the Missouri, swans wheeling overhead, and men bent over corn and cordage. The two accounts, though brief, illustrate the division of observational labor that gives the expedition’s documentary record its layered texture.
Two Registers of Preparation
Clark’s entry adopts the register of a commanding officer surveying conditions and visitors. He notes the weather’s shift from a cloudy morning with a northeast wind to a fair afternoon, marks the arrival of “Several Indians,” and registers the seasonal signal of migrating waterfowl:
a Cloudy morning wind from the N E the after part of the Day fair, Several Indians visit us today, prepareing to Set out on our journey Saw Swans & wild Gees flying N E this evening
Ordway, by contrast, writes from inside the workshop. Where Clark gestures broadly at “prepareing to Set out,” Ordway specifies the tasks underway:
making a Stearing oar for the Big Barge &. C. others Shelling corn &. C.
The contrast is characteristic. Clark, as co-commander, tracks meteorology, diplomacy, and natural omens — the categories that will matter for the official report. Ordway, the senior sergeant, documents the granular labor of a fort breaking camp: the fabrication of a steering oar for the keelboat (the “Big Barge” that will return downriver to St. Louis) and the shelling of corn for provisions. Read together, the two entries triangulate the same day from command and from the ranks.
The River Threatens the Canoes
Clark’s second notation for the date — appended in the manuscript under March 26 but referring back to the evening of the 25th — records a moment of genuine alarm:
The ice broke up in Several places in the evenig broke away and was nearly takeing off our new Canoes river rise a little
The detail is significant. The expedition had spent weeks felling cottonwoods and hollowing the six dugout canoes that would carry the permanent party up the Missouri above the Mandan villages. To have those canoes “nearly” swept away by the breaking ice would have been catastrophic, delaying departure by weeks and consuming labor the Corps could ill afford. Ordway does not mention the near-loss, suggesting either that he was not posted near the riverbank that evening or that the incident was contained quickly enough not to register in his more task-oriented log. Clark, responsible for the boats, marks it precisely.
Cross-Narrator Patterns
The March 25 entries exemplify a pattern visible throughout the Fort Mandan winter: Clark and Ordway frequently record the same day without overlap of detail. Clark notes the swans and geese flying northeast — a phenological observation that doubles as a hint about the season’s progress and the route ahead. Ordway, who elsewhere is attentive to natural history when it intersects with subsistence, here says nothing of the birds. Conversely, Ordway’s specification of the steering oar gives a concrete object that Clark’s general phrase “prepareing to Set out on our journey” subsumes without naming.
Neither narrator copies the other. Where the journals of Lewis, Clark, and the sergeants sometimes show clear textual borrowing — particularly when Lewis’s prose is later mined by Clark or Gass — the March 25 entries are independent compositions. Ordway’s terse workshop notation and Clark’s weather-and-visitors summary point to separate writing habits formed by separate responsibilities.
The omission of the ice incident from Ordway’s journal is a useful caution for readers of expedition records. Even on a quiet Sunday in a familiar location, no single narrator captures the full day. The “Big Barge” steering oar that Ordway records and the new canoes Clark nearly lost are pieces of the same departure preparation, visible only when the entries are read side by side. Two days of fair weather and northeast winds would follow before the breakup of the river ice in earnest, but March 25 marks the moment when the work of leaving Fort Mandan turned from plan to imminent execution.
