The entries of December 6, 1805, capture a single shared ordeal — a windstorm and a flood tide that drove the Corps of Discovery from their low encampment on the south side of the Columbia estuary, where they had begun the work that would become Fort Clatsop. Three narrators left records of the day: Captain William Clark, Sergeant John Ordway, and Sergeant Patrick Gass. Read together, the entries illustrate how the expedition’s hierarchy of observation produced layered, mutually reinforcing testimony, even as each writer’s prose retained its own register.
A Shared Event, Three Registers
Clark, as commanding officer and the most prolific journalist of the day, supplies the most detailed meteorological record. He tracks the wind from the southwest through the night and into the day, notes the rain’s persistence, and marks the precise moment of change:
Wind blew hard all the last night, and a moderate rain, the waves verry high, This morning the wind which is Still from the S W increased and rained Continued all day, at Dusk wind Shifted to the North and it Cleared up and became fare
Clark also offers a quantitative measurement that neither sergeant attempts: the high tide, he writes, came in “13 Inches higher than yesterday.” This precision reflects Clark’s habitual role as the expedition’s surveyor and recorder of measurable phenomena. Ordway, by contrast, gives only an approximation — “the tide raised about 2 feet higher than common” — a different baseline (the ordinary tide, not yesterday’s) and a rougher figure. Gass omits the measurement entirely, summarizing simply that “the tide flowed so high, that in some part of our camp the water was a foot deep.”
Each narrator thus selects a different metric for the flood: Clark by comparison to the previous day, Ordway by comparison to the customary tide, and Gass by the depth of standing water in camp. The three measurements describe the same event from complementary angles.
Patterns of Influence and Independent Detail
The verbal echoes between Clark and Ordway are striking. Both record that the camp had to be moved “to higher ground” — Ordway writing “we moved our Camps to higher ground,” Clark writing that the party was “obliged to move our Camp out of the Water on high grown all wet.” Gass uses nearly identical phrasing: “we had therefore to remove to higher ground.” The repetition across three independent journals suggests this was the operative phrase used in camp that day, rather than evidence of one narrator copying another. Sergeants Ordway and Gass, who often produced parallel summaries of captains’ observations, here appear to have written from direct experience of wading out of the flooded bivouac themselves.
Yet each narrator also preserves something the others omit. Gass alone specifies the timing of the worst rain — “At noon it rained very hard” — a detail absent from Clark and Ordway. Ordway uniquely characterizes the weather as a “Storm,” a stronger word than Clark’s measured “moderate rain” and “rained Continued all day.” Clark alone notes the evening clearing and the wind’s shift to the north, an observation consistent with his sustained attention to weather as navigational data.
The Smoke Detail and the Captain’s Second Entry
Clark’s journal for December 6 actually contains two versions of the day’s events — a feature of his Fort Clatsop-period record-keeping, in which he sometimes drafted a field entry and then rewrote it. The second version closes with a domestic complaint absent from the first: “Smoke exceedingly disagreeable.” This brief addition is invaluable. Neither Ordway nor Gass mentions the smoke, yet the comment hints at what relocating to higher ground actually meant — wet wood, smoldering fires, and shelters hastily reassembled in the rain. Clark’s revision, in other words, restores a sensory detail that the bare narrative of flood and removal would otherwise erase.
Taken together, the three entries of December 6, 1805, demonstrate how cross-narrator reading recovers texture that no single journal preserves. Clark supplies the measurements and the meteorological arc; Ordway intensifies the event into a “Storm”; Gass anchors it in time of day; and Clark’s own second draft adds the choking smoke of the new, higher camp. The Corps had not yet built Fort Clatsop, but the discomforts of their winter on the Pacific coast were already, by this date, fully on the page.
