The journal entries of February 16, 1805, capture a single episode — the pursuit of Sioux raiders who had stolen horses from the expedition — through two very different vantages. Sergeant John Ordway writes from the field, marching beside Captain Lewis up the frozen Missouri. Captain William Clark writes from Fort Mandan, piecing together a report from returning men. The contrast in register, detail, and pacing illustrates how the expedition’s documentary record was layered: eyewitness narration filtered, summarized, and occasionally corrected by the captains in residence.
Ordway’s Tactical Field Account
Ordway’s entry is the longer and more granular of the two, written with the cadence of a soldier expecting combat. He describes the moment the party sighted smoke rising from the Mandan lodges where Gravelines’s men had been robbed the previous fall, and the careful tactical disposition that followed:
when we came in Site we Saw a Smoak which we expected that they were all their waiting for another oppertunity to S[t]eel more horses or to attack us. we then went up the bank of the river a considerable distance above the place in to the bushes, left the horse, sled & baggage [and] even our blankets.
Ordway records the signal arrangement Lewis devised — a sergeant and detachment held in reserve, to advance only on the sounding of a horn — and then the anticlimax of finding the lodges empty for twenty-four hours, two of the largest set ablaze by the departing raiders. He notes the meat pen torn down, two elk stripped, and small scraps of buffalo broiled and abandoned in a smaller lodge. The trail led up a steep bluff into the prairie, at which point Lewis broke off pursuit and turned the men to hunting. Ordway closes with the practical accounting that recurs throughout his journal: ten miles marched, camp made on the south side, a deer and a wolf killed before dark.
Clark’s Compressed Garrison Report
Clark, remaining at Fort Mandan, records the same day in a few sentences. His perspective is that of a commander receiving intelligence at dusk:
at Dusk two of the Indians who wint down with Capt. Lewis returned, Soon after two others and one man (Howard) with his feet frosted, and informed that the Inds. who Commited the roberry of the 2 horses was So far a head that they could not be overtaken
Where Ordway dramatizes the approach to the smoking lodges, Clark distills the operation to its result: the raiders could not be overtaken. Yet Clark preserves a forensic detail Ordway omits entirely — the moccasins left behind. He writes that the raiders left “a number of pars of Mockersons which, the Mandans knew to be Souix mockersons,” and further notes that the war party had camped near his own recent hunting camp and deposited corn there “as a deception, with a view to induc a belief that they were Ricarras.” This identification, supplied by Mandan informants at the fort, is precisely the kind of intelligence the field party could not gather while in pursuit.
Complementary Records, Divergent Registers
The two entries together form a more complete picture than either alone. Ordway supplies the texture of the chase — the smoke, the cached blankets, the broiled buffalo scraps, the bluff into the prairies — while Clark supplies the ethnographic and strategic frame: that the raiders were Sioux, not Arikaras, and that they had attempted to disguise their identity. Ordway also notes that Howard’s feet were frostbitten only by implication (he is one of the men sent back), whereas Clark names him directly, a reminder that the captain at the fort was tracking the welfare of individuals as they straggled in.
The register difference is equally telling. Ordway writes in the collective “we” of the marching detachment, his syntax tracking movement and contingency. Clark writes in the third person of command, condensing a day of Lewis’s activity into the single line, “Capt Lewis & party proceeded on down,” followed by the laconic admission that the meat cached at his own recent camp had been taken. For students of the expedition’s documentary practices, February 16 offers a clear case of how the journals were designed to function in parallel — the enlisted narrator preserving the experiential grain of the day, the captain preserving the analytical synthesis available only at the post.
