The Fort Mandan entries for 17 February 1805 offer a striking study in divided attention. Sergeant John Ordway and Captain William Clark, occupying the same stockade on the same mild winter day, produce journal entries so different in subject and register that a reader unfamiliar with the expedition’s structure might suppose them written weeks apart. Ordway tracks meat; Clark tracks men. Together they sketch the dual economy of a winter post preparing for departure — provisioning the boats and managing the diplomatic web that made provisioning possible.
Ordway’s Hunt: Logistics in the Bottoms
Ordway’s surviving fragment plunges the reader directly into tactical detail. The hunting party splits
in different directions, aiming to drive the Game in to the bottom of wood as much as possable So that the best hunters who was in the bottom might kill them
The technique — beaters pushing game toward marksmen stationed in cover — is described with the matter-of-fact precision of a sergeant accustomed to coordinating squads. Ordway concludes with a tally: ten deer and four elk, with the surplus
hung up the remainder on trees so as to keep the wolves from it.
This is the only mention on the date of the wolves that shadowed every Mandan-winter cache, and it appears nowhere in Clark’s entry. The detail is characteristic of Ordway, whose journal across the expedition consistently registers the practical labor — the caching, packing, and protecting — that the captains often delegated and therefore omitted.
Clark’s Ledger: Diplomacy, Trade, and Theft
Clark’s entry, by contrast, opens with a weather note in his standard captain’s-log format and then catalogs visitors. Black Cat (“the Coal”) arrives
with about 30 w. of Drid Buffalow meat, & Some Tallow
— a gift or trade that mirrors, on the diplomatic axis, the meat Ordway’s hunters were hanging in the cottonwoods. Clark then notes the visit of
Mr. McKinsey one of the N W. Compys. Clerks
and adds, in a parenthetical aside that does considerable historical work,
(one of the hoses the Sous robed a fiew Days past belonged to this man)
In a single line Clark records the Mandan chief’s provisioning, the presence of a North West Company representative inside the American post, and the lingering consequences of a Sioux raid that had crossed cultural and commercial lines. Where Ordway counts carcasses, Clark counts relationships.
What the Comparison Reveals
The two entries illustrate a pattern visible throughout the Fort Mandan winter: Ordway and the captains were, in effect, keeping complementary books. Ordway logs the expedition as a working unit — who hunted, what was killed, how it was preserved. Clark logs the expedition as a diplomatic enterprise embedded in a contested fur-trade landscape, where a Mandan leader’s gift of dried meat and a Nor’wester’s grievance over a stolen horse belong in the same paragraph because both shape the captains’ calculations.
Neither man borrows from the other on this date. Ordway’s entry contains no weather note; Clark’s contains no hunt report, though the hunters Ordway describes were certainly under Clark’s command and their returns would have been known to him by evening. The silence is telling. Clark, with Lewis absent from the surviving record for the day, treats the hunt as routine background and foregrounds the unusual — the visitors. Ordway, having been with or near the hunting parties, treats the hunt as the day.
Register reinforces the divide. Ordway’s prose is sequential and verbal: “aiming,” “returned,” “killed,” “packed,” “hung up.” Clark’s is nominal and relational, organized around named persons and their affiliations: the Coal, his Son, Mr. McKinsey, the N W. Compy., the Sous. Ordway narrates an action; Clark annotates a network.
Read together, the entries restore a fuller February day at Fort Mandan than either alone preserves: hunters driving deer through frozen bottoms while, inside the fort, a Mandan chief and a British clerk arrive within hours of each other, the latter still nursing a loss to a Sioux raiding party. The expedition’s preparations for spring departure were proceeding on both fronts at once, and it took two journal-keepers of different rank and temperament to record it.
