December 17, 1805, found the Corps of Discovery in the early, unfinished days of Fort Clatsop. Three narrators — Sergeant Patrick Gass, Sergeant John Ordway, and Captain William Clark — recorded the day, and their entries, set side by side, reveal how differently three literate men in the same camp could shape a shared experience into prose.
Three Registers of the Same Workday
Gass, characteristically terse, compresses the day into a weather report and a labor note:
light showers of rain and hail. About 11 o’clock the 7 men came with the canoe and the remainder of the meat. We still continued working at our huts.
His sergeant’s entry is functional, almost a duty-log: hours, headcount, task. Ordway, working at the same fort and likely within earshot of Gass, expands the catalogue of labor:
we went at chinking up our huts and Splitting plank &C. cut our meat & hung it in the meat house &C.
Where Gass abstracts (“working at our huts”), Ordway itemizes the constituent jobs — chinking, splitting, butchering, storing. The two sergeants’ entries together suggest the rhythm of an enlisted man’s day, organized around tasks rather than reflection.
Clark, by contrast, writes at length and in two passes — the shorter field entry and a fuller fair-copy version. His expanded version absorbs nearly every detail Ordway notes, then adds a captain’s situational awareness: weather phases, terrain, the condition of stores, even the failing leather lodge.
What Clark Sees That the Sergeants Do Not
Several details appear only in Clark’s journal. He alone records the mountain to the southeast:
The mountain which lies S. E of this is covered with Snow to day
His fair copy refines the observation with bearing and distance — “S. ____° E. about 10 miles distant” — and adds a topographic judgment, calling its top “ruged and uneavin.” This is the captain’s habit of mind: even on a day of carpentry, he is taking the country’s measure. Neither Gass nor Ordway lifts his eyes from the huts.
Clark also alone notes the failure of the lost meat that Gass passes over silently and Ordway mentions only obliquely. Where Gass writes that the seven men brought “the remainder of the meat,” Clark and Ordway both clarify that one of three elk could not be recovered. Clark goes further, attributing the loss to “the party that got lost night before last” — a small piece of accountability the sergeants omit.
Most striking is Clark’s closing inventory of damage:
The most of our Stores are wet. our Leather Lodge has become So rotten that the Smallest thing tares it into holes and it is now Scrcely Sufficent to keep off the rain off a Spot Sufficiently large for our bead.
This is a commander’s reckoning — a private acknowledgment that the expedition’s shelter is failing precisely when permanent quarters are not yet finished. The sergeants, whose responsibilities did not extend to the stores or the captains’ lodge, had no occasion to record it.
Convergences and the Question of Influence
The three entries share enough vocabulary — “chinking,” the seven men, the meat — to suggest the narrators compared notes or at least overheard the same shop-talk. Ordway’s “chinking up our huts and Splitting plank” closely parallels Clark’s observation that “The trees are hard to Split for Punchens to Cover our houses.” Yet Clark’s phrase “Punchens” (puncheons, split slabs used as roofing or flooring) is technical vocabulary the sergeants do not adopt; Ordway sticks with the more general “plank.”
The weather sequence — rain and hail in the morning, fair and cool in the afternoon — appears in both Clark and (in compressed form) Gass, but the precise two-part structure (“fore part… after part…”) is Clark’s alone. Whether Gass derived his weather note from Clark or simply observed the same sky is impossible to determine from the entries themselves, though the close lexical overlap on this and many other dates has long encouraged scholars to suspect mutual consultation among the journal-keepers at Fort Clatsop.
Taken together, the three entries for December 17 illustrate a pattern recurrent throughout the winter at Clatsop: Gass distills, Ordway enumerates, and Clark contextualizes. The same wet day produces a logbook line, a workshop list, and a small panorama with a snow-capped mountain on its horizon.
