The expedition’s encampment on the south shore of the Columbia, within sight of the breakers, produced three journal entries on November 16, 1805, that share a common skeleton — clear weather, baggage spread to dry, hunters dispatched, game tallied — yet diverge dramatically in tone, scope, and detail. Read together, the entries by Patrick Gass, John Ordway, and William Clark expose how each narrator processed the same encampment through a different filter.
Gass’s Triumphal Frame
Of the three, Gass alone treats the date as a milestone worthy of rhetorical elevation. His entry opens an entire chapter (Chapter XVI in the published 1807 edition) with a declarative summation:
E are now at the end of our voyage, which has been completely accomplished according to the intention of the expedition, the object of which was to discover a passage by the way of the Missouri and Columbia rivers to the Pacific ocean; notwithstanding the difficulties, privations and dangers, which we had to encounter, endure and surmount.
This is the polished cadence of Gass’s editor David McKeehan as much as Gass himself, and it reflects the published journal’s need to mark narrative climaxes. Gass also offers a precise game tally — "2 deer, 9 brants, 2 geese, 1 crane, and 3 ducks" — that exceeds Ordway’s vaguer "four Deer and a number of geese brants and ducks" and even differs from Clark’s count. The waves, Gass notes, were "like small mountains, rolling out in the ocean," a simile absent from the other two journals.
Ordway’s Spare Parallel
Ordway’s entry is, as often, the most economical. He reproduces the day’s essential events in a single short passage:
went out a hunting, we put our baggage out to dry. towards evening the hunters all except one returned to Camp had killd four Deer and a number of geese brants and ducks, a number of Savages Stayed with us all day.
Ordway and Gass agree closely on the day’s structure — drying baggage, hunters out, all but one returned — suggesting either shared conversation in camp or the common sergeant’s habit of recording quartermaster-style facts. But where Gass elevates the day and Clark interrogates it, Ordway flattens it. His one distinctive contribution is the bare notice that "a number of Savages Stayed with us all day," a detail Gass omits entirely and which Clark, by contrast, expands into a small diplomatic episode.
Clark’s Layered Field Notes
Clark’s two surviving versions of the entry — a rougher field note and a fair-copy expansion — together carry the bulk of the day’s ethnographic, scientific, and topographic content. Where Ordway’s "Savages" is a single phrase, Clark records arrivals, departures, and the management of camp access:
The 5 Indians Theves left me… three Indians Came up from below I gave them Smoke but allowed then no kind of Priveleges what ever, they camped with the 4 which Came down yesterday, near us
The wariness here — smoke offered but "no kind of Priveleges" — reflects ongoing tensions over pilfering that Gass and Ordway elide. Clark also alone records the scientific business of the day: a meridian altitude with the sextant of "50° 36 15" yielding latitude "46° 19′ 11 1/10" North" in the fair copy, and the failed attempt at lunar observations under evening cloud. He notes a Chinook canoe passing "loaded with Wap-pa-toe roots," the snow on a distant peak beyond Point Adams, and a small natural-history note on brant species:
The White Brant, with part of their wings black is much the largest, the black brant is verry Small, a little larger than a large Duck
Clark also identifies the sick man’s affliction — "a violent Cold, Caught by lying in his wet Clothes" — a medical detail neither sergeant records.
Patterns Across the Three
The three narrators converge on the day’s logistics (drying gear, hunting parties, the returning men) but differ predictably by role. Gass, filtered through publication, supplies the rhetorical capstone. Ordway supplies the terse parallel record. Clark, as co-commander, carries the latitude observation, the diplomatic management of visiting Chinooks, the topographical sketch from Point Adams to Haley’s Bay, and the natural-history aside on brant. The game tallies themselves — Gass’s seventeen birds and two deer, Ordway’s vaguer count, Clark’s "2 Deer 1 Crane & 2 ducks" supplemented by York’s "2 Geese & 8 white, black and Speckle Brants" — show that even quantitative facts shifted as each writer reconstructed the day from memory or notes.
