The entries of November 2, 1805, document a single shared experience — completing the portage at the lower Cascades of the Columbia, running the loaded canoes through the rapid, and proceeding into the broadening tidewater reach below Beacon Rock. Yet the two surviving accounts, written by Sergeant Patrick Gass and Captain William Clark, diverge sharply in scope, register, and detail. Read together, they illustrate how the expedition’s narrators distributed the labor of observation.
Parallel Logistics, Different Scales
Both men open with the portage. Gass compresses the morning into a single sentence: the men “carry part of the baggage across a portage of two miles and an half, while the rest took down the canoes.” Clark gives the same operation in finer-grained terms, noting the portage was “of about 1½ miles” — a notable discrepancy with Gass’s “two miles and an half” — and explains the captains’ decision-making process:
Examined the rapid below us more pertcelarly the danger appearing too great to Hazzard our Canoes loaded, dispatched all the men who could not Swim with loads to the end of the portage below.
Where Gass reports outcomes, Clark reconstructs reasoning. Clark also records minor damage Gass omits entirely: “one Struck a rock & Split a little, and 3 others took in Some water.” Gass’s silence on the canoe damage is characteristic — his journal tends to record what was accomplished rather than what nearly went wrong.
Encounters, Geography, and the Tide
The arrival of Native travelers at the portage is mentioned by both narrators, but with different emphasis. Gass notes simply that “one of the Indian canoes remained with us and the other three went on.” Clark, by contrast, particularizes the encounter:
7 Squars Came over the portage loaded with Dried fish & Beargrass, Soon after 4 men Came down in a Canoe.
Clark’s second, expanded entry adds that the bear grass was “neetly bundled up” — a small ethnographic notice of trade goods moving down the river toward the coast. Gass passes over the cargo entirely.
The geographic catalogue below the portage is almost wholly Clark’s. He tracks rapids by mileage (“a rapid at 2 miles & 1 at 4 miles”), names landmarks (Strawberry Island, Beacon Rock — his “Beatin rock”), counts houses in a village (“a village of nine houses”), and identifies the timber on the surrounding mountains: “Pine, Spruce pine, Cotton wood, a Species of ash, and alder.” Gass reduces all of this to a single observation that “the river opens to the breadth of a mile, with a gentle current,” and that “the country here becomes level.”
Most strikingly, Clark records a scientific observation Gass misses entirely — the upstream limit of the Pacific tide:
The tide rises here a fiew 9 Inches, I cannot assertain the prosise hite it rises at the last rapid or at this placeof Camp.
This is a significant moment for the expedition: confirmation that they have descended into tidewater. Gass, whose entry was likely drafted from briefer field notes and later edited for publication, contains no hint of it.
Counting the Game
The day’s hunting tally provides the clearest case of narrators working from shared information. Gass writes that “on our way and at camp we killed 17 geese and brants.” Clark itemizes the same total by hunter:
Labiech killed 14 Geese & a Brant, Collins one Jos. Fields & R 3.
The arithmetic agrees — fourteen plus one plus three equals eighteen by Clark’s count, or seventeen if the “Brant” is folded into Labiche’s fourteen, matching Gass. Clark further notes a naturalist’s detail Gass omits: “those gees are much Smaller than Common, and have white under their rumps & around the tale” — almost certainly cackling geese, distinguished here from the larger Canada geese the party knew from the plains. Clark’s second entry expands the inventory to include “Swan, Geese, white & grey brants, ducks of various kinds, Guls, & Pleaver.”
The pattern across the day is consistent: Gass produces a serviceable narrative summary suitable for a sergeant’s logbook, while Clark layers logistical, geographic, ethnographic, and natural-historical observation in overlapping passes. Where the two converge — on distances, hunting totals, and the sequence of events — the entries corroborate one another. Where they diverge, Clark almost always supplies the detail Gass elides.
