By mid-November 1805, the Corps of Discovery had reached the Pacific tidewater but could not yet claim the coast. Confined to a rocky point on the north shore of the Columbia estuary by storms and surf, the party finally split: Lewis pressed ahead overland while Clark waited for a break in the weather. The journals of William Clark and Sergeant Patrick Gass for November 15 cover the same short relocation — perhaps three miles down to a sand beach in Haley’s Bay — but differ sharply in scope, tone, and what each narrator chooses to preserve.
Two Registers of the Same Move
Gass, writing in the compressed, expository style that characterizes his published journal, reduces the day to its essential actions: weather, hour of departure, distance, and arrival.
the weather became more calm, and we loaded and set out from our disagreeable camp; went about 3 miles, when we came to the mouth of the river, where it empties into a handsome bay. Here we halted on a sand beach, formed a comfortable camp, and remained in full view of the ocean, at this time more raging than pacific.
The pun on “raging than pacific” is the sergeant’s one rhetorical flourish, and it lands with economy. Clark, by contrast, devotes a long paragraph to the cumulative misery before he ever describes setting out:
The rainey weather Continued without a longer intermition than 2 hours at a time from the 5th in the morng. untill the 16th is eleven days rain, and the most disagreeable time I have experienced Confined on a tempiest Coast wet, where I can neither get out to hunt, return to a better Situation, or proceed on: in this Situation have we been for Six days past.
Where Gass calls the abandoned camp merely “disagreeable,” Clark itemizes the reasons — eleven days of rain, spoiled pounded fish, soaked baggage, no avenue of retreat. Clark also records the practical responses Gass omits: drying bedding when the sun broke through at one o’clock, putting the arms in order, and examining the ammunition.
The Stolen Guns: A Shared Episode, Differently Framed
Both narrators report the theft and recovery of two rifles from George Shannon and Alexander Willard, who had been sent ahead and fallen in with local Chinookan men. Gass’s account is brief and somewhat garbled in its pronouns:
Last night the Indians had stolen their arms and accoutrements, but restored them on the arrival of Captain Lewis and his men in the morning.
Clark, who got the story directly from Shannon when the latter caught up to his party at the deserted 36-house village, supplies the chain of communication and the precise mechanism of recovery:
Shannon informed me he met Capt. Lewis Some distance below & he took willard with him & Sent him to meet me, the Inds with him wer rogues, they had the night before Stold both his and Willards guns from under their heads, Capt. Lewis & party arrived at the Camp of those Indians at So Timely a period that the Inds. were allarmed & delivered up the guns &c.
The two passages illustrate a recurring pattern across the expedition record: Gass typically learned of separated-party events secondhand, often through Clark or the captains’ summaries, and he tends to compress them into a single sentence stripped of intermediaries. Clark, receiving Shannon’s report in person, preserves the courier relay (Lewis to Willard back to Clark) that Gass collapses.
Details Only Clark Records
Several elements of the November 15 entry appear nowhere in Gass: the deserted village of thirty-six houses “in full possession of the flees”; the small creek emptying there; the four Indians who paddled down with wapato roots to trade for blankets or robes; and Clark’s stern warning, delivered to men who “understood Some English,” that any further theft of guns would be answered with gunfire. Clark also attempts geographic precision, sketching bearings from his marshy camp to Cape Disappointment (S. 86° W.) and Point Adams (S. 35° W.), though he leaves the distances blank — a sign the entry was drafted in the field for later completion.
Gass, writing for an eventual reading public, gives the reader a clean narrative arc: storm, wait, departure, arrival, recovered guns. Clark, writing for himself and for the captains’ official record, gives the reader the texture of the day — wet powder, fleas, suspicious traders, an armed sentinel, and the long-awaited first unobstructed view from Cape Disappointment to Point Adams of an ocean that refused to live up to its name.
