The journal entries for December 3, 1805, capture a single day at the peninsula where the Corps of Discovery would soon establish Fort Clatsop. Both Patrick Gass and William Clark note the same core events: hunters returning with elk, a visit from Indigenous travelers, and the late arrival of Sergeant Pryor and Gibson with news of six more elk killed. Yet the two narrators diverge sharply in tone, detail, and self-positioning, offering an instructive case in how expedition record-keeping varied by author.
Two Registers, One Day
Gass writes in his characteristically compressed, third-person voice, treating the day’s events as a sequence of logistical facts. He notes that the hunters had “a disa-greeable trip, it being dark before they arrived at the place where the elk had been killed,” and that “six of the natives came to our camp, the first who had appeared since our arrival.” His entry runs to a few sentences, with no mention of personal hardship or symbolic gesture.
Clark, by contrast, opens with his own bodily distress:
I am unwell and cannot Eate, the flesh O! how disagreeable my Situation, a plenty of meat and incaple of eateing any
This exclamatory complaint — rare in Clark’s prose — frames the rest of his entry. Where Gass simply records that elk meat arrived, Clark renders the meat almost cruel in its abundance. He then describes purchasing wapato roots from passing Indians for a fish hook, and in his second draft of the entry adds a clinical observation absent from the first: the roots “gave me great relief I found the roots both nurishing and as a check to my disorder.” The revision shows Clark refining his account toward medical and ethnobotanical utility.
Details One Narrator Catches and the Other Misses
Gass identifies the visiting party as “Six of the natives,” while Clark counts eight and specifies their purpose: they were “on their way down to the Chit Sops with Wap pa to to barter with that nation.” Clark thus situates the encounter within a regional Indigenous trade network, information Gass either did not gather or did not consider worth recording. Clark also marvels at the canoe’s seaworthiness in heavy surf, noting that “maney times their Canoe was entirely out of Sight before they were 1/2 a mile distance” — an ethnographic detail that Gass omits entirely.
Clark alone records Sacagawea’s resourcefulness in the camp economy:
The Squar Broke the two Shank bones of the Elk after the marrow was taken out, boiled them & extracted a Pint of Greese or tallow from them
In his second draft Clark elaborates that the rendered grease “is Superior to the tallow of the animal.” Gass, who shared the camp and presumably the meal, makes no mention of this. The omission is consistent with a broader pattern in Gass’s journal, where domestic and culinary labor — particularly Sacagawea’s — receives little attention.
Marking the Land
The most striking divergence is Clark’s record of carving an inscription into a tree:
I marked my name & the day of the month and year on a large Pine tree on this Peninsella & by land Capt William Clark December 3rd 1805. By Land. U States in 1804 & 1805
Clark’s second version refines the wording slightly, placing the tree “imediately on the isthmus.” This act of territorial inscription — coupling personal name with national claim — is wholly absent from Gass’s entry. Whether Gass did not witness it, did not recognize its significance, or simply did not consider it within the scope of his journal, the silence is telling. Clark, as co-commander, understood the entry as part of an official record of arrival; Gass, as sergeant, recorded only what the working party had done.
Read together, the two entries demonstrate how the expedition’s documentary archive was built from overlapping but non-identical witnesses. Gass supplies the labor log; Clark supplies the diplomatic, medical, and symbolic register. Neither alone would convey the texture of December 3, 1805 — a day of hunger amid plenty, trade across cultures, and a name cut into bark on the edge of the Pacific.
