The first of March 1805 found the Corps of Discovery deep in preparations to leave Fort Mandan and push up the Missouri. Three of the expedition’s narrators—Sergeant John Ordway, Sergeant Patrick Gass, and Captain William Clark—left entries for the day. Read together, the three accounts present a layered picture of the fort’s industry, but they also expose the very different registers in which enlisted men and officers documented their world.
Three Vantage Points on a Single Workday
Ordway’s entry is the most operationally specific of the three. As a sergeant responsible for daily details, he tracks rations and assignments with a quartermaster’s precision:
work hands got their axes repaired and drew 2 days provisions and went up to camp by their work untill they have the 4 perogues completed, the after part of the day clear and pleasant.
Ordway names the tools (axes), the issued supply (two days’ provisions), the destination (a work camp away from the fort), and the goal (four pirogues). He even closes with a weather note. His is the entry of a noncommissioned officer who must know who is where and with what.
Gass, by contrast, writes in retrospect. His March 1 material is embedded in a summary passage that telescopes the canoe-building work of late February into a continuous narrative. He recalls how the canoes were carried to the river about a mile and a half distant
, how rising water and breaking ice complicated their move, and how a test launch on the 27th forced a logistical decision:
We found they would not carry as much as was expected, and Captain Lewis agreed to take a large periogue along.
Where Ordway captures a single day, Gass synthesizes weeks. His prose has been smoothed—almost certainly by his editor David McKeehan, who prepared the 1807 publication—into the orderly past tense of a finished memoir. The phrase preparing our craft for a renewal of our voyage
belongs to the published book’s voice rather than to the rough field journal Gass kept at the fort.
The Captain’s View from the Writing Table
Clark’s entry is the briefest and the most telling about hierarchy. While Ordway is supervising work parties and Gass is at the riverbank with the canoes, Clark sits indoors with paper and ink:
a fine Day I am ingaged in Copying a map, men building perogus, makeing Ropes, Burning Coal, Hanging up meat & makeing battle axes for Corn
The grammatical structure is revealing. Clark separates himself from men
by an em-dash of syntax: he copies the map; they do everything else. The list that follows—pirogue construction, rope-making, charcoal burning, meat curing, and the forging of trade axes for Mandan and Hidatsa corn—is far broader than either sergeant records. Clark sees the whole fort because his role requires him to. Yet he gives no detail to any single task. Ordway’s four pirogues become Clark’s generic building perogus
; the ironwork that Clark dismisses in three words was a major trade enterprise that had been feeding the expedition through the winter.
What Each Narrator Notices
The cross-narrator pattern is consistent with what scholars have long observed across the expedition’s documentary record. Clark, the cartographer-captain, registers activity at the level of the whole command and uses his journal time for higher-order work—on this day, copying a map, almost certainly one of the charts he and Lewis intended to send back with the return party in April. Ordway, the senior sergeant, writes the most reliable daily log of any expedition member, anchored in concrete numbers and named tasks. Gass, whose original 1805 field notebook does not survive, reaches the historical record only through McKeehan’s polished 1807 prose, which compresses and rationalizes the raw chronology.
No narrator copies another here. Each writes from his own station and within his own conventions. The convergence is not in language but in subject: all three confirm that Fort Mandan on March 1, 1805 was a fully mobilized workshop, its men driving toward a departure that would come just over a month later, on April 7. The pirogues Ordway counts, the canoes Gass remembers carrying through ice, and the ropes and battle axes Clark glances past would all be in the water within weeks.
