December 13, 1805 was an ordinary working day at the half-built Fort Clatsop: Indian visitors came and went, hunters returned with elk, and the men kept splitting timber in the rain. Yet the three surviving journal entries for the day — by Patrick Gass, John Ordway, and William Clark — illustrate how differently three literate members of the same expedition could process an identical set of events.
Counting the Elk
The most concrete cross-narrator discrepancy is also the smallest. Gass writes plainly that the hunters “had killed 18 elk, not more than 4 miles distant.” Clark, in both his field and fair-copy entries, agrees on the number:
Drewyer & Shannon returned from hunting havg. killed 18 Elk and butchered all except 2 which they Could not get as night provented ther finding them & they Spoild.
Ordway, however, records that the same two hunters “had killed 17 Elk.” The one-elk gap is trivial in itself, but it is a useful reminder that the journals were not collated against one another at day’s end. Gass and Clark may share a source — Clark names the hunters as Drouillard and Shannon and specifies the location “near the right fork of the river about 6 miles above this place,” a detail Gass compresses to “not more than 4 miles distant” and Ordway omits entirely. Clark alone notes the loss of two carcasses to nightfall and spoilage, the kind of logistical detail that mattered to a captain provisioning a winter camp.
The Skins and the Capot
All three men note the morning departure of a party of Indians, but only Clark and Ordway record the transactions that accompanied the visit, and they record different ones. Ordway writes that “Cap.t Lewis bought Several kinds of curious Skins from the natives as a curiousity, such as wild cat and some other Small Skins which the Indians Call Shugolell which they make Robes of.” The framing is ethnographic — Ordway preserves an Indigenous term (“Shugolell”) and frames the purchase as collection of curiosities.
Clark, by contrast, frames the same exchange in terms of personal use. He bought two robes of “a Small animal” intending to make a “Capot” (a hooded coat), and Lewis bought “2 Loucirvia Skins for the Same purpose.” In his fair copy Clark elaborates the animal as “about the Size of a Cat” and renders Lewis’s skins as “2 Cat or Loucirva Skins.” The term “Loucirva” — Clark’s phonetic stab at loup-cervier, the French-Canadian name for the lynx — points to Drouillard or another engagé as a likely intermediary. Gass mentions neither the skins nor the prospective coats, his shorter entry passing over the commerce entirely.
Clark also alone records a second visit later in the day: “3 Indians in a Canoe Came and offered us for Sale Sinutor roots, fish & 2 Sea otter Skins for Sale none of which we Could purchase.” The detail that the captains could not purchase the sea otter skins — a recurring frustration along the lower Columbia, where Clatsop and Chinookan traders set prices the expedition could not meet — is exactly the sort of strategic note Clark tends to keep and the others tend to drop.
Construction, Register, and Audience
On the building of the fort itself, Ordway is the most technical narrator. He alone gives the floor plan: “three [sides of a] Square and 7 rooms 16 by 18 feet large, the other Square we intend to picket and have gates at the 2 corners, so as to have it a defensive fort.” Gass — himself the expedition’s principal carpenter — says only that “hands were engaged at work,” a striking economy from the man actually directing the joinery. Clark splits the difference, noting that the men are building “of the Streightest & _____ logs” (a blank he never filled) and expressing satisfaction that “the timber Splits butifully, and of any width.” His fair copy upgrades the species to “Streight butifull balsom pine” and the splittable width to “2 feet or more” — a small but characteristic example of Clark amplifying a field note into something more presentable.
The weather provides a final calibration. Gass: “cloudy and some rain fell in the evening.” Ordway: silent. Clark, field copy: “Some rain last night and this day at Several times, light Showers.” Clark, fair copy: “Some Showers of rain last night, and to day Several verry hard Showers.” Between draft and revision, the showers grew heavier — a reminder that even the captain’s own record of a single Pacific winter day was not stable on the page.
