The journals of Patrick Gass and John Ordway for December 25, 1805 read, at first glance, as if one were transcribed from the other. Both sergeants record the same sequence of events: the move into the newly completed huts, the dawn salute of small arms, the captains’ distribution of the last tobacco and silk handkerchiefs as Christmas gifts, the absence of ardent spirits, and the poor elk meat eaten without salt. The parallelism is striking enough to suggest either shared conversation around the fort that evening or the common practice among the enlisted journal-keepers of comparing notes. Yet the two entries diverge in tone and emphasis in ways that illuminate each narrator’s habits of mind.
Shared Ceremony, Shared Scarcity
Both sergeants foreground the morning salute. Gass writes that "At day break all the men paraded and fired a round of small arms, wishing the Commanding Officers a merry Christmas." Ordway’s version is nearly identical in substance:
the party Saluted our officers by each man firing a gun at their quarters at day break this morning, they divided out the last of their tobacco among the men that used [it] and the rest they gave each a Silk hanker-chief, as a Christmast gift, to keep us in remembrence of it
Gass renders the same exchange more tersely: the captains "collected what tobacco remained and divided it among those who used tobacco as a Christmas-gift; to the others they gave handkerchiefs in lieu of it." Where Ordway adds the sentimental flourish — the handkerchief is meant "to keep us in remembrence of it" — Gass simply notes the substitution. This is consistent with each man’s broader register: Gass, the carpenter-sergeant, tends toward inventory and procedure; Ordway, the senior sergeant, more often allows feeling into his prose.
The complaint about provisions is also shared, almost verbatim in its key phrases. Gass writes that "meat is plenty, but of an ordinary quality, as the elk are poor in this part of the country" and that the party is "without salt to season that." Ordway echoes: "we have nothing to eat but poore Elk meat and no Salt to Season that with." The repeated grievance — poor elk, no salt — would become a refrain throughout the Fort Clatsop winter.
Divergent Spirits
Where the two accounts most clearly part company is in their attitude toward the want of liquor. Gass treats the absence as a fact softened by good health:
We had no spirituous liquor to elevate our spirits this Christmas; but of this we had but little need, as we were all in very good health.
Ordway makes the same point but pushes it into something closer to a moral declaration: the men "are all in good health which we esteem more than all the ardent Spirits in the world." He then adds a forward-looking note absent in Gass: "Still keep in good Spirits as we expect this to be the last winter that we will have to pass in this way." That single sentence — the anticipation of homeward travel — captures something the captains’ own entries do not foreground. For Ordway, Christmas at Fort Clatsop is endurable because it is the final winter; for Gass, it is endurable because the men are not sick.
What the Sergeants See That the Captains Do Not
Compared with Clark’s better-known entry for the day — which laments the "pore Elk, so much Spoiled that we eate it thro’ mear necessity" and notes the small private exchanges of weasel tails and an Indian basket — the sergeants’ journals are more concerned with the collective ritual than with individual gifts. Neither Gass nor Ordway mentions Sacagawea’s present to Clark or Clark’s to Lewis. Their Christmas is the enlisted men’s Christmas: the volley at dawn, the tobacco ration, the handkerchief in lieu.
Gass alone extends his entry past the 25th, folding the next three days into the same paragraph and recording details no other narrator preserves at this length: the smoking huts, the absence of chimneys except in the officers’ rooms, the men set to building chimneys, the rumor on the evening of the 27th that "a large fish, answering to the description of a whale, was driven upon shore," and the departure of six men for the coast on the 28th "to make salt, as we have none in the fort." In compressing four days, Gass inadvertently produces the most efficient summary of how Fort Clatsop’s domestic economy took shape in its first week — a pattern of practical labor and outward-bound parties that would define the winter.
