The journal entries for December 18, 1805 expose a striking divergence of attention among the four men keeping records at the half-built Fort Clatsop. The same hours that Patrick Gass dismisses in two sentences become, for Meriwether Lewis, an opportunity for several hundred words of natural-historical description. Between these poles, William Clark and John Ordway document the labor and misery of an expedition trying to roof itself before winter fully arrived.
Weather and Work: Gass, Clark, and Ordway
Gass offers the day’s most compressed account, noting only that the morning was stormy, that the weather cleared at midday, and that the afternoon was fine. His brevity is characteristic, but on this date it is also misleading — the other narrators describe conditions far harsher than “stormy.”
Clark, by contrast, registers the day as “Cold and a dreadfull day,” emphasizing the toll on the men:
the men being but thinly dressed, and no Shoes causes us to doe but little
Clark kept two versions of the entry, and the parallel field- and notebook-drafts agree closely. The second specifies “mockersons without Socks” as the reason “but little can be done at the Houses to day.” The repetition reveals Clark’s priorities: weather is documented because it bears directly on the construction of shelter and the welfare of the party. Where Gass abstracts the day into a tidy weather summary, Clark ties meteorology to labor.
Ordway adds a detail neither Gass nor Clark records — a canoe expedition across the bay to retrieve plank from “Some old fishing Camps.” The editorial footnote in the Wisconsin Historical Collections edition flags a chronological discrepancy: Clark dates this same plank-gathering trip to December 19, and similarly assigns to December 20 a visit from Native people that Ordway places on the 19th. This running one-day offset between Ordway and Clark is a recurring feature of the Fort Clatsop journals and a useful caution for any researcher reconstructing the daily sequence of events. Ordway’s weather note — “a little hail and frozen rain & cold” — sits between Gass’s understatement and Clark’s emphatic “dreadfull.”
Lewis Apart: The Corvid at Camp
Lewis’s entry for December 18 belongs to a different genre entirely. While Clark records that the men could scarcely work, Lewis devotes his journal to the careful description of a bird shot near camp as it fed on scraps of meat. The entry runs to a full anatomical inventory — beak length, the small notch in the upper chap, the imbricated black legs, the twelve tail feathers graduated from five inches at center to four at the outer edge, the “pale bluish white” of throat and breast. He even transcribes the call: que, quit-it, que-hoo; and tah, tah, tah.
this bird is common to this piny country are also found in the rockey mountains on the waters of the columbia river or woody side of those mountains
The bird Lewis describes is now identified as Clark’s nutcracker or, more likely given the plumage details, the gray jay (Canada jay). Lewis goes further, noting a second, larger blue corvid he had encountered on the Missouri waters but never managed to collect, and gestures toward the “large blue crested corvus of the Columbia river” — almost certainly Steller’s jay. The entry is one of several at Fort Clatsop in which Lewis, freed from the daily demands of river navigation, turned the winter quarters into a working natural-history station.
Register and Division of Labor
Read together, the four entries illustrate the implicit division of journalistic labor among the captains and the enlisted journalists. Gass and Ordway, both sergeants, write in the practical register of soldiers: weather, tasks, errands. Clark, as co-commander, integrates weather with the operational consequences for the party. Lewis, on a day when bad weather and inadequate footgear halted construction, simply does not mention the construction at all — his silence on the men’s suffering is as conspicuous as his minute attention to a single bird’s tail feathers.
The editorial annotations preserved in the Thwaites and Wisconsin Historical Collections editions also remind researchers that Clark’s two surviving fort diagrams disagree with Ordway’s verbal description of the post, another small reminder that even contemporaneous, on-the-ground sources can diverge in their particulars.
