The entries for December 10, 1805 capture a divided expedition: Captain William Clark was returning overland from a reconnaissance to the Pacific shore while the main party, under Lewis, began raising the log walls of what would become Fort Clatsop. Three journalists — Clark, Sergeant Patrick Gass, and Sergeant John Ordway — left accounts of the day, and their convergences and divergences offer an unusually clear window into how information traveled through the corps and onto the page.
Two Sergeants, One Source
Ordway and Gass record nearly identical facts about Clark’s return, and the parallels suggest they drew on the same debrief rather than on independent observation. Ordway notes that towards evening Capt Clark and 3 of his party returned from the ocean and informed us that it was about 7 miles to the ocean,
while Gass writes that about 2 o’clock Capt. Clarke and 3 of his party returned to camp… They found the ocean to be about 7 miles from our camp.
The mileage figure, the count of three returning men, and the mention of a Clatsop village are common to both. Gass, however, supplies details Ordway omits: the terrain breakdown (for 4 miles the land high and closely timbered: the remainder prairie cut with some streams of water
), an elk killed, a herd of about fifty sighted, and three Indian lodges observed on the seashore.
The two sergeants also diverge on timing. Ordway places Clark’s arrival towards evening,
while Gass specifies about 2 o’clock.
Gass alone records the diplomatic housekeeping — that the Clatsop visitors at camp went away this morning after receiving some presents
— and only Gass announces the day’s structural milestone: In the evening we laid the foundation of our huts.
Ordway, by contrast, mentions only that hands wen[t] at clearing away the ground for the huts.
For a reader trying to date the founding of Fort Clatsop’s structures, Gass is the more precise witness.
Clark’s Coastal Ethnography
Clark’s own entry operates in an entirely different register. Where the sergeants summarize, Clark narrates in scenes — and his account divides cleanly into the morning at the Clatsop village and the afternoon’s wet return march. He opens with marksmanship as cross-cultural theater, noting that his hosts were Some what astonished, at three Shot I made with my little riffle to day.
He killed two brant on the water and decapitated a duck in flight, prompting the Clatsop to remark, in Clark’s transcription, Clouch Musket, wake, com ma-tax Musket which is, a good Musket do not under Stand this kind of Musket.
Neither Ordway nor Gass preserves this exchange, and neither records the small-bore rifle’s caliber (100 to the pound
) that prompted it.
Clark also documents a substantive ethnographic observation that the sergeants miss entirely: the Clatsop reliance on tide-stranded fish. He writes that an Indian was in Serch of fish which is frequently thrown up on Shore and left by the tide,
and concludes that this Small band depended in Some Measure for their winters Subsistance on the fish which is thrown on Shore and left by the tide.
His trade experiment is equally revealing: the Clatsop would Scercely
trade roots for red beads but accepted small fish hooks readily — a market signal about color preference and utility that Clark turns into practical intelligence.
What the Sergeants Could Not See
The contrast is instructive. Ordway condenses Clark’s report into a single sentence — considerable of prarie land on the Coast &C. Some low marshes also
— that flattens topography, ethnography, and trade observation into a generic gloss. Gass does better on the landscape and the elk, but neither sergeant could record the named individual Cus-ca-lar,
the young chief who, in Clark’s telling, Crossed me over the 3 Creek
on the return. Only Clark, present at the village, could supply that name.
Read together, the three entries demonstrate the layered documentary practice of the expedition: a captain’s first-person narrative, refracted through evening conversation into shorter sergeant-level summaries, with the construction of the fort itself proceeding as a parallel storyline that the absent captain barely mentions. Clark closes only with the observation that he found Capt Lewis with all hands felling trees, to build with
— a single line where Gass marks a foundation laid.
