The journals of November 5, 1805 capture the Corps of Discovery deep in the tidewater stretch of the lower Columbia, surrounded by waterfowl, Indigenous villages, and a landscape of timbered ridges crowding the river. Two narrators — Sergeant Patrick Gass and Captain William Clark — describe the same day in dramatically different scales and registers, and a comparison reveals how each man’s temperament and role shaped what made it onto the page.
The Sleepless Captain and the Steady Sergeant
Clark opens both of his draft entries with an unusually personal complaint. Twice he records that the noise of waterfowl on a nearby sand island kept him from sleeping:
I could not Sleep for the noise kept by the Swans, Geese, white & black brant, Ducks &c. on a opposit base, & Sand hill Crane, they were emensely numerous and their noise horrid.
The second version intensifies the detail — “I slept but verry little last night” — and specifies the location of the offending birds as “a Small Sand Island close under the Lard. Side.” This is Clark in his most embodied mode: cold feet and legs, wet clothes, a captain registering the discomforts of command in the field. He even pauses, mid-geographic catalogue, to note that he “saw 17 Snakes to day on a Island, but little appearance of Frost at this place” — a naturalist’s aside embedded in a logistical entry.
Gass, by contrast, makes no mention of the noise, the cold, or his own body. His entry opens neutrally — “last night about 2 o’clock, and the morning was cloudy” — and proceeds in the compressed, evenly-paced summary style that characterizes his journal throughout the expedition. Where Clark distinguishes a “large village” of fourteen connected houses fronting a quarter mile of channel, Gass condenses the day’s Indigenous encounters into a single generalization: “We passed a great many Indian camps, their lodges made chiefly of poles and cedar bark.” Gass’s lodges are typological; Clark’s are counted.
A Discrepancy in the Hunters’ Bag
One of the more interesting cross-narrator details on this date is a small numerical disagreement. Gass writes:
some of the men went out and killed nine brants and a swan. Three of the brants were quite white except the points of their wings, which were black.
Clark’s first entry tallies the kill differently:
our hunters killed 10 Brant 4 of which were white with black wings 2 Ducks, and a Swan which were divided
Clark’s second, more expansive entry — describing a dinner stop on a low grassy island with ponds full of fowl — gives yet another count: “a Swan, 4 white 6 Grey brant & 2 Ducks.” The discrepancy (nine versus ten brant, no ducks versus two) is minor but instructive. Gass appears to be working from memory or a brief end-of-day note, while Clark’s running field-book habit of recording at multiple points during the day produces a fuller — and internally more consistent — accounting. The detail of the white brant with black wingtips, almost certainly snow geese, appears in both journals, suggesting it was discussed among the men as a notable feature of the day’s hunt.
Geography in Two Scales
The geographic content of the entries diverges even more sharply. Gass offers a generalized landscape: higher country than the day before, spruce on the heights, cottonwood and maple in the bottoms, a thirty-one-mile run, and an encampment on the north side where “the tide rises and falls 4 feet.” That tidal observation is the kind of practical datum a sergeant of the guard would prize.
Clark, meanwhile, produces something closer to a reconnaissance survey. He measures river widths (“not more than 3/4 of a mile,” then “about 11/2 miles”), counts houses, notes the orderly disposition of seven canoes of traders who “accompanied us a fiew miles and returned back,” and works to reconcform his channel observations with those of the previous day near “Immage Canoe Island.” His prose moves between cartographer and ethnographer, while Gass’s remains that of a diarist summarizing for a future reader.
Read together, the two accounts illustrate a recurring pattern in the expedition’s documentary record: Gass provides the reliable skeleton of distance, weather, and general terrain, while Clark fleshes out the day with counts, measurements, named features, and — on this particular wet November night — the sleepless irritation of a man kept awake by the horrid noise of ten thousand birds.
