By late January 1805, the keelboat and pirogues at Fort Mandan had been locked in Missouri River ice for weeks. The captains’ increasingly inventive efforts to free them produced one of the winter’s most thoroughly cross-documented failures: an attempt to heat stones in a fire, drop them into water inside the hulls, and melt the surrounding ice from within. William Clark, Patrick Gass, and John Ordway all describe the experiment on 29 January, and their three accounts — varying in vocabulary, scope, and tone — offer a useful case study in how information moved (and did not move) among the expedition’s writers.
Three Versions of One Failure
Clark, as commanding officer, frames the day’s labor in operational terms. He opens the entry with an unrelated medical note — “Gave Jassome a Dost of Salts” — before turning to the stone-heating scheme:
we Send & Collect Stones and put them on a large log heap to heet them with a View of warming water in the Boat and by that means, Sepperate her from the Ices, our attempt appears to be defeated by the Stones all breaking & flying to peaces in the fire
Clark’s phrasing is administrative: a plan, a method, a result. He alone notes the parallel project of the day — “we are now burning a large Coal pit, to mend the indians hatchets, & make them war axes, the only means by which we precure Corn from them” — situating the boat-freeing effort within a wider economy of fuel, iron, and Mandan trade that Ordway and Gass omit entirely.
Sergeant Ordway, writing at the enlisted-man’s level, supplies physical detail Clark does not. He describes “hailing Stone on hand Sleds from a Bluff below,” the labor of collection that Clark abstracts into “we Send & Collect.” Ordway also specifies the intended vessels — “the pearogues & barge” — and registers the moment of disappointment with sensory immediacy:
but come to heat the Stone they flew in peaces as soon as they Got hot, So that we could not make use of them at all.
Gass, by contrast, writes in the polished retrospective register that characterizes his journal (later reshaped further by his editor David McKeehan). His version is the most condensed:
water craft disengaged from the ice: which was to heat water in the boats, with hot stones; but in this project we failed, as the stones we found would not stand the fire, but broke to pieces.
Where Ordway’s stones “flew in peaces” and Clark’s go “flying to peaces,” Gass’s simply “broke to pieces” — a tidier idiom suggesting either independent phrasing or editorial smoothing.
Patterns of Borrowing and Independence
The shared vocabulary is striking. All three writers reach for the phrase “to pieces” to describe the stones’ fracture, and all three identify the same causal logic: heat applied, stones failed, plan abandoned. This convergence is consistent with the well-documented pattern at Fort Mandan in which sergeants compared notes with — or copied from — the captains’ journals during the long winter evenings. Yet the differences argue against direct copying on this date. Ordway’s detail of the sleds and the bluff is his own; Clark’s coal-pit and hatchet-trade context is his alone; Gass adds a follow-up entry for 30 January noting that he personally went “up the river and found another kind of stones, which broke in the same manner,” extending the failure across two days in a way neither of the others does.
Gass’s continuation is particularly valuable. It reveals that the experiment was not abandoned after a single day’s disappointment — a second source of stone was tested before the men gave up, leaving the “batteaux and periogues” still “fast in the ice.” Without Gass, the documentary record would suggest a one-day attempt; with him, the effort becomes a small campaign.
What Lewis’s Silence Suggests
Meriwether Lewis produced no entry for 29 January 1805, part of his well-known journal gap during much of the Fort Mandan winter. The absence makes Clark’s account the senior-officer record by default and elevates the value of Ordway’s and Gass’s parallel testimony. Where Lewis is silent, three corroborating witnesses establish not only the fact of the experiment but the affective weather around it — the labor of hauling, the brief hope of a clever solution, the small humiliation of stones that “would not stand the fire.” The boats remained frozen; the corn-trade continued; the journals, between them, preserved the day.
