The Corps of Discovery left Fort Clatsop at one o’clock in the afternoon, ending a 106-day encampment on the Oregon coast and beginning the homeward journey up the Columbia. Two enlisted journalists — Sergeant Patrick Gass and Sergeant John Ordway — set down accounts of the day. Read together, they show how differently two men in the same canoe brigade could shape a single afternoon into prose.
Two Registers, One Departure
Gass writes in his characteristic clipped, quartermaster’s voice. He counts canoes (“five in number, three large and two small”), notes the loading was finished at noon, and tracks the day’s distance at 19 miles to a campsite at a creek mouth. The whole departure occupies a few sentences. The reflective weight of leaving winter quarters — a place where men had been sick, hungry for fresh meat, and soaked nearly every day — does not enter his page.
Ordway, by contrast, opens with weather and indecision:
this morning proved so rainy and uncertain that our officers were undetermined for some time whether they had best Set out & risque the [wind] which appeared to be riseing or not.
Where Gass simply reports that the loading happened, Ordway preserves the hesitation behind the order. He then pauses the narrative entirely for a retrospective summary of the winter:
at this place we had wintered and remained from the 7th of Decr 1805 to this day, and have lived as well as we had any right to expect, and we can say that we were never one day without 3 meals of Some kind a day, either poor Elk meat or roots, notwithstanding the reputed fall of rain which has fallen almost continualy since we passed the long narrows on the [blank in Ms.] of Novr last.
This sentence is nearly identical in structure and phrasing to Lewis’s own famous summation of Fort Clatsop. The shared formula — “lived as well as we had any right to expect” — is one of the clearest instances on this date of an enlisted journalist echoing the captain’s language, suggesting either that Ordway heard Lewis’s wording aloud or that the captains’ summary circulated through camp on the morning of departure. Gass, who often paraphrases rather than copies, includes none of this reflective register.
Details One Narrator Catches and the Other Misses
Ordway sees more on the water. He records an encounter Gass omits entirely: a Chinook trading party that intercepted the canoes shortly after they left the fort.
Soon after we had set out from fort Clatsop we were met by a party of the chinooks, the old baud and hir Six Girls, they had a canoe, a Sea otter Skin dryed fish & hats for Sale, we purchased a Sea otter and proceeded on thro Meriwethers Bay.
The phrase “the old baud and hir Six Girls” refers to a Chinook woman whom the captains’ journals had earlier identified as bringing young women to trade sexual services to the men of the fort. That this same party paddled out to make one last transaction — and that the Corps purchased a sea otter skin from them on the way out — is a piece of departure-day ethnography preserved only by Ordway.
Ordway also notices the sea state. He describes “a stiff breeze from the S. W. which raised considerable swells around Merewethers Point, which was as much as our canoes could ride.” Gass, despite rounding the same point, says only that “the afternoon was fair” and that they “proceeded round Point William.” The discrepancy on weather is striking: Ordway frames the day as wet morning, anxious launch, and rough crossing; Gass frames it as fair afternoon and a successful 19-mile run.
Convergence at Camp
The two accounts converge at the night’s campsite. Both sergeants record meeting the advance hunting party — Drouillard and the two Field brothers in Ordway’s specification — who had killed two elk roughly a mile and a half from camp. Gass logs the day at 19 miles; Ordway at 16. Such mileage disagreements are common between the two journalists and reflect independent estimation rather than copying.
The combined picture is one the Corps would have recognized: a damp, hesitant launch, a brief trade with Chinook neighbors, a hard pull around an exposed point, and a familiar reunion with the hunters at dusk. It took two narrators of very different temperaments to preserve all of it.
