The entries for November 21, 1805, find the Corps wind-bound on the south shore of the Columbia estuary, unable to begin the return upriver to seek a winter camp. All three narrators present — Patrick Gass, John Ordway, and William Clark — converge on a single transaction with a coastal native: the purchase of a sea-otter robe in exchange for a belt of blue beads worn by the wife of their interpreter Toussaint Charbonneau. Yet around this shared anecdote, the three accounts diverge sharply in scope, register, and ethnographic curiosity.
Three Versions of a Single Trade
Gass renders the negotiation as a small drama of refused offers. He notes that the owner of the robe “refused, and said he would not take five” blankets, and that the only blue beads at hand were on the belt “belonging to our interpreter’s squaw.” His sentence structure is brisk and transactional, characteristic of his sergeant’s-journal economy.
Ordway, working from his own observation but echoing the same plotline, expands slightly on the natives’ insistence on blue beads as the sole acceptable medium of exchange:
our officers being anxious to purchase a robe made of two of those animels, they offered great prices in cloaths trinkets &.C. but they would not take any thing except blue beeds. at length they purchasd the Robe for a beeded belt which our Intrepters Squaw had these animels are scarse & hard to kill.
Ordway’s closing observation — that sea otters “are scarse & hard to kill” — is a detail neither Gass nor Clark supplies, and it suggests Ordway was attentive to the natural-history reasoning behind the natives’ high asking price. The pattern of Ordway and Gass producing parallel but not identical phrasing recurs throughout the expedition’s records; here, as often, they appear to share an oral source (likely camp conversation among the enlisted men) rather than copying directly.
Clark, by contrast, mentions the trade only in passing — “we gave the Squar a Coate of Blue Cloth for the belt of Blue Beeds we gave for the Sea otter Skins” — a one-line settlement that incidentally records a detail the sergeants omit: that Sacagawea was compensated for the surrendered belt with a coat of blue cloth.
Clark’s Ethnographic Turn
What sets Clark’s entry apart is that the otter-robe transaction is buried inside a far longer survey of the surrounding peoples. He names neighboring nations and chiefs — “The nation on the opposit Side is Small & Called Clap-soil, Their great chief name Stil-la-sha” — records the latitude as 46° 19′ 11″ North, and produces an extended description of dress, ornament, and physique. The women, he writes, wear “a Short peticoat of the iner bark of the white Ceder or Arber Vita,” while the men wrap themselves in robes of sea otter, loon, swan, beaver, or trade blankets “either red, blu, or white.”
Clark also notices what the sergeants either did not see or chose not to record: tattooing. He observes that the women “Pick their legs in different figures as an orpiment” and, more startlingly, that he “saw the name of J. Bowmon marked or picked on a young Squars left arm” — physical evidence of prior contact with Euro-American maritime traders along the coast.
Register and Reticence
Clark alone addresses the sexual economy of the encampment, noting that “Several Indians and Squars came this evening I beleave for the purpose of gratifying the passions of our men” and reflecting that the local people “appear to View Sensuality as a necessary evile.” Gass and Ordway are silent on this point. Whether their silence reflects discretion, the conventions of an enlisted-man’s journal intended for eventual publication, or simple disinterest is impossible to determine, but the contrast highlights a recurring pattern in the expedition’s records: Clark, as co-commander, more often takes on the role of ethnographer and demographer, while Gass and Ordway concentrate on weather, distance, provisions, and the day’s notable transactions.
The shared report of high winds and high waves — Gass’s “the wind blew so violent,” Clark’s “emence Swells & waves which almost entered our Encampment” — anchors all three entries in the same physical reality. But the journals diverge in what each narrator considers worth preserving once the weather is logged and the otter-robe purchased: for the sergeants, very little; for Clark, an entire coastal society in miniature.
