The entries for November 30, 1805 capture the Corps of Discovery split between two undertakings: Meriwether Lewis pushing up an inlet on the south shore of the Columbia in search of a winter station, while William Clark and Patrick Gass remain at camp drying gear and dispatching hunters. The same wet day produces three texts that diverge sharply in scope, register, and detail — and yet share a common preoccupation with food.
Three Registers of the Same Day
Patrick Gass compresses the day into four sentences. He notes only that a hunting party “went round the cape and killed two or three ducks,” then offers a stark summary of the Corps’ diet:
This is all the supply of fresh provisions that we have had since we have been at this camp. We live almost altogether on pounded salmon.
Where Gass condenses, Clark expands. His field entry and his fair-copy entry for the same date both run to long paragraphs cataloguing weather intervals, bird species, reptiles, insects, and trees. Lewis, meanwhile, writes a reconnaissance narrative — a moving record of bearings, distances, and reasoning. He explains his motive plainly: “where there is most game is for us the most eliguble winter station.” The three voices reflect three jobs being done simultaneously.
Clark Revises Himself
Clark’s two surviving versions of the entry offer a rare chance to watch him edit in near real time. The field draft mentions only that several men were “Complaining of being unwell to day.” In the fair copy he diagnoses the cause and prescribes a remedy:
Several men Complain of a looseness and gripeing which I contribute to the diet, pounded fish mixed with Salt water, I derect that in future that the party mix the pounded fish with fresh water
The fair copy also elaborates the famous bread anecdote. Both versions record that Sacagawea — “the Squar” in Clark’s spelling — produced a piece of bread she had saved for her child. The field draft notes only that the flour “had unfortunately got wet.” The fair copy adds Clark’s gratitude:
this bread I eate with great Satisfaction, it being the only mouthfull I had tasted for Several months past.
The revision converts a logged fact into a small scene of feeling, suggesting Clark understood the fair copy as a more public document.
Overlapping and Diverging Catalogues
Both Clark and Lewis itemize the birds they observe, but the lists barely overlap, because the men are in different places. Clark, at camp, sees “The large Buzzard with white under their wings Grey & Bald eagle large red tailed hawk, ravins, Crows,” and notes the smaller songbirds are absent. Lewis, six miles up the inlet, encounters waterfowl in abundance: “brant, large geese, white brant sandhill Cranes, common blue crains, cormarants… the canvas back, duckinmallard, black and white diver, brown duck.” The two catalogues, read together, sketch the ecology of the lower Columbia more fully than either alone.
The day’s hunting tally is meager and the three narrators report it with characteristic differences. Gass simply notes “two or three ducks.” Clark records that his hunters “killed only 3 hawks, saw 3 Elk but Could not git a Shot at them,” and that the fowlers brought in three black ducks, which he describes in careful taxonomic detail — bill, plumage, feet, feeding habits, flock size. In the fair copy he adds a culinary judgment Gass would never have ventured: the hawks were “fat and delicious.”
What Gass Omits, What Lewis Implies
Gass says nothing of Sacagawea’s bread, nothing of the sick men, nothing of Lewis’s scouting expedition — though he was at the same camp and presumably aware of all three. His silence is consistent with his journal’s overall character: a sergeant’s logbook, not a naturalist’s notebook or a commander’s reconnaissance report. Lewis, for his part, makes no mention of camp life at all; his entry is a tactical document closing with the strategic conclusion that draws him up the bay. Read in parallel, the three accounts reveal how the expedition’s documentary record depends on the division of labor among its writers — and how the fullest picture of November 30, 1805 emerges only when their voices are laid side by side.
