The journal entries dated January 30, 1805, from Fort Mandan illustrate how three expedition narrators — Sergeant John Ordway, Sergeant Patrick Gass, and Captain William Clark — could occupy the same winter quarters yet produce strikingly different records. One man tracks a craft problem at the forge; another notes a diplomatic exchange with a fur-trade rival; the third’s published text bears the marks of later editorial intrusion. Read together, the entries expose the differing registers and reliability of the expedition’s documentary record.
Ordway at the Forge: A Failed Experiment in Stone
Ordway alone preserves a small but telling episode of practical experimentation at Fort Mandan. The party had been working stone — likely for tool or hearth construction — and sought a variety that could withstand heat without fracturing. Ordway records the trial and its failure with characteristic plainness:
the River to an other bluff in order to look for another kind of Stone that would not Split with heat he brought one home & het it found it was the Same kind of the other as soon as it was hot it bursted asunder So we Gave up that plan.
This is the sort of workaday detail Ordway notices that the captains routinely omit. Where Lewis and Clark tend toward summary and command-level concerns, Ordway documents the texture of enlisted labor — the bluff visited, the stone hauled back, the heat applied, the disappointment, the abandonment of the project. Neither Clark’s entry for the day nor Gass’s surviving text mentions the experiment at all, leaving Ordway as the sole witness to this minor but revealing moment of frontier improvisation.
Clark and the La Rocque Question
Clark’s entry, by contrast, is brief and diplomatic in focus. The morning was fine and then clouded over by nine o’clock, and the captain devotes his pen almost entirely to a single visitor:
Mr. La Rocke paid us a Visit, & we gave him an answer respecting the request he made when last here of accompanying us on our journey &c.
François-Antoine Larocque, a clerk of the North West Company then trading among the Mandan and Hidatsa villages, had earlier asked permission to travel west with the Corps of Discovery. Clark does not record the answer itself in this entry, but expedition historians know it was a refusal — the captains were under instructions not to facilitate British commercial reconnaissance into the territory the United States had just acquired by the Louisiana Purchase. Clark’s terseness here is itself characteristic: a sensitive geopolitical exchange compressed into a single decorous sentence. Ordway, occupied at the bluff and the forge, says nothing of Larocque’s visit, and the two sergeants’ silence on the matter is consistent with a pattern in which captain-level diplomacy rarely filtered into the enlisted men’s journals.
Gass and the Problem of the Printed Text
The Gass entry attributed to this date presents a different problem altogether — one of textual transmission rather than observation. The OCR text bears no resemblance to a Fort Mandan winter entry. Instead it describes a moving party traveling by canoe through open prairie:
Fae morning and went on very well. We passed through a handsome Country, with a rich soil, and the prairies rising beautifully on both sides oF the a river. We went 24 miles and encamped on the
and later:
We set out… and went on till 12 o’ clock, when the wind rose so high, that our small canoes could not stand the waves. We made only 10 miles this day.
These passages plainly belong to the spring or summer voyage upriver, not to a January day at Fort Mandan, where the Corps was wintered in and the Missouri was frozen. The text appears to be a mis-paginated or misaligned scan from David McKeehan’s 1807 published edition of Gass’s journal, in which printed page breaks and running heads (“JOURNAL,” “1805”) have been pulled together by OCR across non-adjacent leaves. The fragment is useful chiefly as a reminder that Gass’s record reaches readers only through McKeehan’s heavy editorial hand, and that the printed volume’s pagination does not always cleanly map to date.
Three Records, Three Registers
The contrast is instructive. Ordway, the diligent enlisted diarist, captures a small technical defeat that no one else thought worth noting. Clark, with the responsibilities of command, attends to a foreign trader’s request and the implicit contest for influence on the upper Missouri. Gass, or rather the printed Gass, supplies in this instance no usable Fort Mandan content at all — a gap that itself testifies to the uneven survival and transmission of the expedition’s documentary base. Cross-reading the three is less an exercise in reconciling testimony than in recognizing what each narrator was positioned, by role and by editorial fortune, to preserve.
