The seventh of December 1805 marks a pivotal logistical moment for the Corps of Discovery: the move from their temporary camp to the site Meriwether Lewis had selected for winter quarters on the south side of what Clark would name Meriwether’s Bay. Three journalists—Sergeant Patrick Gass, Sergeant John Ordway, and Captain William Clark—each describe the day’s passage, and a side-by-side reading reveals how rank, literary habit, and personal proximity to events shape the surviving record.
Three Registers, One Voyage
Gass, characteristically terse, compresses the day’s events into a single efficient paragraph. He notes the fair morning, the loading of canoes, the rendezvous with the meat party, and the final ascent of the river to the chosen ground. His prose is functional and measured:
We coasted down the south side about a mile, and then met with the six men, who had gone for meat. They had brought 4 of the skins but no meat, the distance being great and the weather very bad.
Ordway, working in the same enlisted-man’s idiom, supplies more sensory texture. He observes that “the Shore is covred thick with pine and under brush” and records a near-mishap that Gass omits entirely:
the canoe I was in ran on a sand barr and was near filling, but the waves took hir off without injury
This is a detail only Ordway, riding in that particular canoe, would have reason to preserve. It is a useful reminder that the sergeants’ journals are not redundant: each man records the day from where he physically sat.
Clark’s Double Entry and the Naming of the Bay
Clark produces two versions of the day, a shorter field note and a fuller fair-copy entry. The expanded version supplies information neither sergeant possessed or chose to record. It is Clark who identifies Sergeant Pryor as the leader of the meat party, who explains that the hunters had been “lost in the woods for one Day and part of another,” and who reports the fate of the breakfast deer:
we proceeded on around the point into the bay and landed to take brackfast on 2 Deer which had been killed & hung up, one of which we found the other had been taken off by some wild animal probably Panthors or the Wildcat of this Countrey
Ordway alludes to this same meal—”halted and cooked a young Deer which the hunters had killed the other day”—but mentions only one deer and offers no speculation about predators. Gass omits the breakfast entirely. The pattern is consistent with Clark’s officer’s-eye perspective: he tracks the disposition of cached provisions and the wildlife that competes for them, while the sergeants record what they ate.
Clark also alone supplies the act of naming. The bay receives its title in his fair-copy entry:
I have taken the liberty of calling Meriwethers Bay the Cristian name of Capt. Lewis who no doubt was the 1st white man who ever Surveyed this Bay
Neither Gass nor Ordway records this christening. The naming is a captain’s prerogative, and it is preserved only in the captain’s journal—a useful reminder that the toponymic record of the expedition is essentially a Lewis-and-Clark artifact, not a corporate one.
York, Pryor, and the Question of Who Notices Whom
One of the day’s small dramas is the temporary loss of York, Clark’s enslaved manservant. Ordway records the absence in a single neutral clause: “Cap* Clarks servant did not come up with the rest.” Clark, naturally, gives the episode more weight, twice mentioning the delay and offering an explanation in his fair copy: “my man york, who had Stoped to rite his load and missed his way.” Gass does not mention York at all. The differential attention illustrates how the journals refract the expedition’s social hierarchy—Clark tracks his own household, Ordway notes its disturbance in passing, and Gass, focused on the corporate task of moving the canoes, omits the matter.
Similarly, the identification of Sergeant Pryor as commander of the meat detail appears only in Clark. Gass refers anonymously to “the six men,” Ordway to “the men who had been out to take care of the meat.” The captains know who leads each detachment; the sergeants describe the detachment as a body.
Read together, the three entries for December 7, 1805, demonstrate the layered character of the expedition’s documentary record. Gass provides the skeleton, Ordway adds the texture of the canoe seat, and Clark supplies command-level information—names, distances, toponyms, and the small acts of authority such as bestowing a name upon a bay.
