The day after Christmas at the newly occupied Fort Clatsop produced three strikingly different journal entries. Patrick Gass treats the date as part of a multi-day summary, looping back to recount the holiday itself. William Clark, by contrast, stays tightly focused on the immediate discomforts of the 26th. John Ordway, frequently a fuller chronicler, here contributes only a fragmentary weather note. The contrast illuminates how each narrator weighed ceremony, suffering, and routine.
Gass Looks Backward: Christmas Reconstructed
Gass uses the entry to consolidate several days, opening with the Christmas morning salute and gift exchange he had not yet recorded. He notes that at daybreak the men paraded and fired a round of small arms, wishing the Commanding Officers a merry Christmas,
and that Lewis and Clark distributed the last of the tobacco, with handkerchiefs given to non-users. His tone is communal and morale-conscious:
We had no spirituous liquor to elevate our spirits this Christmas; but of this we had but little need, as we were all in very good health. Our living is not very good; meat is plenty, but of an ordinary quality, as the elk are poor in this part of the country. We have no kind of provisions but meat, and we are without salt to season that.
Gass also folds in news that the other journalists do not mention on this date — the report of a beached whale received on the evening of the 27th, and the dispatch of six men on the 28th to begin salt-making at the coast. His entry functions almost as a weekly digest, interested in logistics, provisions, and the labor of building chimneys for the smoking huts.
Clark’s Two Drafts: Domestic Misery in Detail
Clark’s two parallel entries — a field draft and a fair copy — concentrate on the immediate sensory environment. Both open with the same weather observation: rained and blew hard last night Some hard Thunder, The rain continued as usial all day.
But Clark’s preoccupation is the interior of the hut. He records that Joseph Fields finished a Table & 2 Seats for us,
a small civilizing detail absent from the other accounts, and notes the drying of wet articles and the fleaing of blankets.
The flea problem dominates. In the field draft Clark complains:
The flees are So troublesom that I have Slept but little for 2 nights past and we have regularly to kill them out of our blankets every day for Several past
The fair copy expands the same observation with slightly more polished phrasing: those trouble insects are So abundant that we have to have them killd. out of our blankets every day or get no Sleep at night.
The revision shows Clark editing for clarity while preserving the substance — a useful glimpse of his composition method. He also flags a tactical concern Gass omits entirely: maney of the men have ther Powder wet by the horns being repeetdly wet,
a problem with real consequences for hunting and defense. Clark, like Gass, registers that the hut Smoke verry bad,
but where Gass treats it as a problem to be engineered away, Clark records it as endured fact.
Ordway’s Silence and What It Suggests
Ordway’s entry is reduced to a single clause: by the high winds and hard Storms hard rain continues as usal.
The phrasing — particularly continues as usal
— closely echoes Clark’s continued as usial,
suggesting either shared weather vocabulary among the journalists or Ordway’s habit of brief notation when little new occurred in his sphere. Ordway misses the table-building, the fleas, the wet powder, and Gass’s salt detail. His brevity is itself evidence: not every narrator felt obligated to log domestic discomfort, and Ordway frequently defaulted to weather alone when garrisoned in fixed quarters.
Patterns Across the Three
Three patterns emerge. First, register diverges: Gass writes for an imagined reader interested in narrative shape and provisions; Clark writes a working log of conditions affecting command decisions; Ordway writes the minimum. Second, only Clark records the flea infestation and wet powder, hazards that would shape the next several weeks at the fort. Third, Gass alone preserves the Christmas-morning ceremony and the first mention of the salt-making detachment and the rumored whale — events the others either skip or defer. Read together, the three entries show how a single damp, smoky day at Fort Clatsop could be remembered as a holiday postscript, a flea-bitten ordeal, or barely remembered at all.
This analysis was AI-assisted and reviewed by a human editor prior to publication.
