The journal entries for February 18, 1805, illuminate a moment when the Corps of Discovery was functionally split between two operations. Patrick Gass and John Ordway were attached to the hunting expedition that Captain Lewis had led downriver from Fort Mandan, while William Clark remained at the fort attending to diplomatic visitors and cartographic labor. Reading the three entries side by side reveals not only how differently each man recorded the same day, but also the practical interdependence of the field party and the garrison.
The Hunters’ Camp: Gass and Ordway Compared
Gass, characteristically terse, compresses the day into a single sentence:
went down the river to hunt. We proceeded on 20 miles and could see no game.
His report registers only motion and absence. Ordway, working from the same camp on the same day, produces a far richer account of the same activity, suggesting the two men were operating in slightly different sub-parties or simply attending to different details. Ordway describes how the main body
moved the camp about 5 m^s down the River to a bottom where cap^t Clarks party had some time before been a hunting, and had made a pen and put up 2 Elk and 11 Deer which we found Safe as they left it.
This passage is significant on several counts. First, it documents the existence of a meat cache, or “pen” — a temporary log enclosure — built during one of Clark’s earlier hunting forays and left unmolested by either wildlife or Indigenous hunters. Second, Ordway’s mileage (“about 5 m^s”) is substantially shorter than Gass’s claimed twenty, indicating that Gass may have ranged ahead while the principal camp moved a shorter distance. The discrepancy is a useful caution against treating any single narrator’s distances as authoritative for the whole party.
Ordway also preserves a small ethnographic detail Gass omits: the men encamped “at an old Indian cabbin near the meat pen,” reusing existing Indigenous structures on the landscape. He closes with a vivid image of the men cracking bones for marrow:
we {leased the meat from the bones and eat the marrow out of them.
The fragmentary opening bracket in the manuscript (likely “released” or “creased”) underscores the rough conditions under which Ordway wrote. Where Gass produces a logbook, Ordway produces a record of camp life — hunters’ returns (“one Elk. & Seven deer”), Lewis’s decision to start back for the fort the next morning, and the marrow feast at day’s end.
Clark at Fort Mandan: A Different Kind of Labor
Clark’s entry, written from the fort itself, belongs to an entirely different genre. Where Ordway reports butchering and Gass reports walking, Clark reports diplomacy and desk work:
a cloudy morning Some Snow, Several Indians here today Mr. McKinsey leave me, the after part of the day fine I am much engaged makeing a discriptive List of the Rivers from Information our Store of Meat is out to day
The departure of “Mr. McKinsey” — Charles McKenzie of the North West Company, whose own narratives of life among the Mandan and Hidatsa survive independently — is noted without elaboration. More telling is Clark’s mention of compiling a “discriptive List of the Rivers from Information,” almost certainly the geographical interrogations he had been conducting with Hidatsa and Mandan informants in preparation for the spring ascent of the Missouri. This is the cartographic groundwork that would later inform the maps carried west.
The final clause carries an urgency the other narrators contextualize: “our Store of Meat is out to day.” Read against Ordway’s entry, Clark’s brief notation explains why Lewis’s hunting party mattered. The fort’s larder was empty on the very day the field camp was packing in elk and deer for transport home. Lewis’s decision, recorded by Ordway, to “Start for the Fort the next morning” was not a matter of routine but of provisioning necessity.
Patterns Across the Three Records
Three habits of mind emerge. Gass writes as a sergeant filing a distance report. Ordway writes as a participant-observer, recording method, location, yield, and even the small pleasures of marrow. Clark writes as a co-commander balancing diplomacy, science, and supply. None of the three duplicates another; rather, each illuminates what the others leave dark. Without Clark, we would not know the fort was out of meat. Without Ordway, we would not know the recovered cache held precisely two elk and eleven deer. Without Gass, we would not have his stark — if perhaps exaggerated — claim that twenty miles produced no game at all.
