The final day of March 1805 finds the Corps of Discovery at Fort Mandan in the last weeks before pushing upriver. Three narrators — Sergeant John Ordway, Sergeant Patrick Gass, and Captain William Clark — leave entries for the date, but each writes at a different scale and in a different register. Read together, they expose how dramatically the same camp could be rendered depending on the writer’s purpose and audience.
Ice, Geese, and the Shape of a Daily Entry
Ordway’s entry is the briefest possible weather observation:
this morning, the Ice does not run So thick in the River as it did yesterday.
That single line — a comparative note on river ice — is the kind of terse environmental marker Ordway often supplies, useful precisely because it anchors a date without elaboration. Clark, writing the same observation, expands it into a small tableau. His field notebook records:
Cloudy Several gangus of Ducks and Gees pass up not much ice floating.
His fair-copy revision sharpens the count and tightens the syntax:
Cloudy Day Seven Gangs of Gees and Ducks pass up the river but a Small portion of ice floating down to day
The shift from “Several gangus” to “Seven Gangs” is characteristic of Clark’s editorial habit — vague quantifiers replaced by specific numbers when he prepared the cleaner version. Ordway and Clark agree on the essential fact (ice diminishing, spring opening), but Clark alone registers the migrating waterfowl moving north, a phenological detail Ordway omits.
Gass at a Different Tempo
Gass’s entry assigned to this stretch of the journal is not a single-day notation at all but a multi-day retrospective covering the construction, launching, and ultimate failure of the iron-framed boat dubbed the Experiment. He writes of Saturday the 6th that the men “engaged at the boat” while four hunters went “down the river to hunt buffaloe, in order to get their skins to [c]over our craft.” By Monday the 8th the boat was finished and christened:
We finished the boat this evening, having covered her with tallow and coal-dust. We called her the Experiment, and expect she will answer our purpose
That optimism collapses within a day. On Tuesday the 9th, after launching:
tallow and coal were found not to answer the purpose, for as soon as dry, it cracked and scaled off, and the water came through the skins. Therefore for want of tar or pitch we had, after all our labour, to haul our new boat on shore and leave it
Gass, the expedition’s carpenter, writes here with the technical investment of a builder, narrating cause and consequence — sealant fails, seams leak, vessel abandoned. His tempo is weeks-long; Ordway’s and Clark’s is hours-long. The contrast illustrates how Gass’s published journal (heavily reworked by editor David McKeehan) often consolidates events into thematic blocks, while the captains and Ordway preserve the day-by-day cadence expected of a military journal.
Morale, Music, and Candor
Where Ordway is silent on the human atmosphere of the fort, Clark is unusually forthcoming. Both his draft and revised entries note the men’s spirits and their amusements:
all the party in high Spirits, but fiew nights pass without a Dance they are helth.
The fair copy elaborates the social texture: the party “pass but fiew nights without amuseing themselves danceing possessing perfect harmony and good understanding towards each other.” This is one of the clearer windows in the journals onto the nightly fiddle-and-dance culture that sustained morale through a Mandan winter.
Clark then adds what neither Ordway nor Gass touches:
Generally healthy except venerials complains which is verry Commion amongst the natives and the men Catch it from them those favores bieng easy acquired.
The frankness is striking. Clark’s draft phrasing — “those favores bieng easy acquired” — is softened but not removed in the fair copy, where he still attributes the infections to contact with Mandan and Hidatsa women. Gass, writing for eventual publication, says nothing of this; Ordway, here at least, confines himself to ice. The cross-narrator silence on venereal disease, broken only by Clark, is itself a pattern: intimate or compromising details about the men tend to surface in the captains’ journals and disappear from the sergeants’ published or publication-bound versions.
Three Scales of Witness
For 31 March 1805, then, the database holds a weather line, a shipwright’s post-mortem, and a captain’s morale report containing a candid medical aside. None contradicts the others; each simply records what its writer was disposed to see. The convergence on ice and the divergence on everything else is a useful reminder that the expedition’s documentary record is not one journal in three hands but three distinct documentary projects running in parallel.
