The entries of February 21, 1805, capture a single event — the return of Captain Lewis’s hunting party with meat from the lower deposit — through three very different sensibilities. Patrick Gass offers a clipped weather note, John Ordway delivers a workman’s account of hauling sleds over softening ice, and William Clark, remaining at Fort Mandan, devotes the bulk of his entry to an ethnographic digression on a Mandan divinatory stone. Read together, the three narrators illustrate how labor on the expedition was distributed — and how observation was distributed with it.
The Hunters’ Return
Ordway, who had stayed behind with the meat of two elk, gives the most physical account of the day’s work. His prose carries the weight of the sleds:
the Snow and Ice thoughed on the River considerable So that it was wet & Slopy hailing the Sled, we pushed on and arived at the Fort before Sunset with all our meat and Skins &.C. the men generally fatigued hailing a heavy load 21 miles on the hard Ice & Snow
Ordway records mileage, surface conditions, and fatigue — the sergeant’s eye for what a body and a sled can endure in a day. Gass, by contrast, contributes only the shortest of meteorological observations: snow had been on the ground since November, and “In the evening the weather became clear and pleasant.” Whether Gass’s terseness reflects his own absence from the hauling party or simply his characteristic economy, his entry omits the labor entirely.
Clark, writing from the fort, supplies the accounting that neither field journal contains. He notes that Lewis abandoned pursuit of the Sioux war party that had destroyed an upper meat cache and burned the lodges, pushed on to the lower deposit, and over two days of hunting killed “36 Deer & 14 Elk, Several of them So meager, that they were unfit for use.” The meat brought in totaled roughly 3,000 pounds, one sled “Drawn by 16 men” carrying 2,400 of it. Clark’s figures and Ordway’s exhaustion describe the same sled.
Clark Alone with the Mandan
What distinguishes Clark’s entry is everything that happens before Lewis returns. Visited by the Big White and Big Man, Clark records — at unusual length — a Mandan practice that neither Gass nor Ordway mentions:
Several men of their nation was gorn to Consult their Medison Stone about 3 day march to the South West to know What was to be the result of the insuing year… They haveing arrived at the Stone give it Smoke and proceed to the wood at Some distance to Sleep the next morning return to the Stone, and find marks white & raised on the Stone representing the piece or war which they are to meet with
Clark’s curiosity is characteristic, but so is the Enlightenment frame he immediately imposes: the stone, he writes, “has a leavel Surface of about 20 feet in Surcumfrance, thick and pores, and no doubt has Some mineral qualtites effected by the Sun.” He notes that “The Big Bellies” — the Hidatsa — “have a Stone to which they ascribe nearly the Same Virtues.” The juxtaposition is striking: a sacred Mandan oracle is described in the same paragraph as a sled-tally of elk and deer, and both are subjected to the same matter-of-fact prose.
Register and Division of Attention
The day’s three entries together reveal a division of narrative labor that recurs throughout the Fort Mandan winter. Gass, whose published Journal would later be edited for a popular audience, here gives only the weather. Ordway, the meticulous sergeant, records the embodied texture of the march. Clark, captain and host, records diplomacy, ethnography, and the quartermaster’s ledger.
None of the three appears to be copying another on this date. Ordway’s mileage and Clark’s poundage describe complementary aspects of the same sled but share no phrasing; Gass’s weather note is independent of both. The contrast with dates when Gass’s entries closely shadow Ordway’s is instructive: on February 21, each man wrote what he had seen, and what he had seen depended on where he had been standing — on the river ice, at the gate of the fort, or in conversation with the Big White.
