The journal entries of December 19, 1805, capture the Corps of Discovery in the second week of building Fort Clatsop on the Pacific slope. The four extant accounts — by Patrick Gass, John Ordway, Meriwether Lewis, and William Clark — diverge sharply in subject and register, offering an unusually clear window into how each narrator understood his task. Where Clark and Gass attend to logistics and weather, Ordway turns inward to bodily complaint, and Lewis withdraws entirely from the day’s labor to compose a meticulous scientific description of a bird.
Clark and Gass: The Logistical Register
Clark’s entry — preserved in two near-identical drafts — frames the day around a salvage expedition. He records dispatching Sergeant Pryor with eight men in two canoes across Meriwether’s Bay to retrieve boards from an abandoned Indian house, while the rest of the party continued work on the huts.
we dispatched Sjt. Pryor with 8 men in 2 Canoes across Meriwethers Bay for the boards of an old Indian house which is vacant, the residue of the men at work at their hutsthe after part of the Day Cloudy with Hail and rain, Serjt. Pryor & party returned in the evening with a load of old boards which was found to be verry indifferent
The second draft adds detail absent from the first — the boards proved “verry indifferent” — suggesting Clark revised with the benefit of Pryor’s evening report. The first draft, by contrast, simply notes “2 Canoe loads of Boards” without judgment of quality.
Gass, characteristically terse, offers only a weather note: an expectation of “fair pleasant weather” disappointed by noon clouds and rain. He says nothing of Pryor’s expedition or the boards, though as a carpenter-sergeant he would have been intimately concerned with the building. His silence here is striking and may reflect the editorial compression his journal underwent before publication.
Clark’s weather observation — “Some rain with intervales of fair weather last night, The morning Clear” followed by an afternoon turn to “Cloudy with hail & rain” — corroborates Gass’s brief notice and is among the clearer cases on this date where the two enlisted-and-officer accounts can be checked against each other.
Ordway’s Body and the Clatsop Visitors
Ordway alone records two facts the others omit. First, his own illness:
I was taken verry unwell last night, the men in general are in good health
Second, that “Several of the Clatsop Savages came to visit us.” Clark mentions only “two Indians,” a discrepancy that may reflect different counting conventions, separate visits across the day, or simply the two narrators’ different thresholds for what counted as worth recording. Ordway’s tendency throughout the winter to note Indigenous visitors by tribal affiliation — here naming them Clatsop — gives his entries an ethnographic specificity that Clark’s more clipped “2 Indians Cam” lacks.
Lewis Among the Jays
Lewis’s entry is of an entirely different order. He writes nothing of the fort, the weather, the visitors, or Pryor’s expedition. Instead, he produces a full natural-history monograph on what is recognizable as Steller’s jay (Cyanocitta stelleri), measuring beak, tail, and wingspan to the eighth of an inch:
the whole length from the point of the beak to extremity of the tail 1 Foot 1 Inch; from the tip of one to the tip of the other wing 1 Foot 51/2 Inches.
He notes sexual dimorphism — the female’s “dark brown” head and back where the male shows “fine gossey bright indigo blue” — transcribes the bird’s calls (“cha’a cha’a’ &c.also twat twat twat”), and compares its restless habit to the eastern blue jay “as they are called in the U States.” The phrasing suggests Lewis composed the entry partly with an Atlantic-seaboard reader in mind, glossing what a Virginian would already know.
This bifurcation — Clark managing the camp on paper while Lewis devotes his journal page to taxonomy — is a pattern that recurs throughout the Fort Clatsop winter. Lewis’s silence on quotidian matters here is not absence of engagement but a deliberate division of labor: the captains’ joint record could rely on Clark for the day’s events, freeing Lewis to use the enforced stasis of winter quarters for the natural-history descriptions that the expedition’s scientific charge demanded.
Patterns Across the Four
No narrator on this date copies another in any obvious way. Clark’s two drafts copy each other, with revision; otherwise each man writes from his own vantage. The contrast is sharpest between Lewis’s eleven-inch beak measurements and Ordway’s plain admission of being “verry unwell” — the same December afternoon refracted through the registers of the field naturalist and the ailing sergeant.
