The journal entries for December 5, 1805 capture a pivotal moment in the expedition’s establishment of what would become Fort Clatsop: Captain Lewis’s return from a scouting expedition with news that a suitable wintering ground had been located. Three narrators—William Clark, Patrick Gass, and John Ordway—record the event, but their accounts diverge in ways that illuminate the social hierarchy of the expedition and the distinct purposes each journal served.
An Anxious Co-Captain and a Stoic Sergeant
Clark’s entry stands apart for its unguarded emotional candor. Having waited through repeated rainstorms with sodden stores and an immobilized party, Clark confesses the toll of Lewis’s absence:
Capt Lewis’s long delay below has been the cause of no little uneasiness on my part for him, a 1000 conjectures has crouded into my mind respecting his probable Situation & Safty-rained hard.
This admission—that a thousand conjectures had crowded into his mind—is the kind of personal disclosure absent from the enlisted men’s journals. Clark also tracks environmental data with a co-commander’s attentiveness: he notes the precise hour of high tide at noon and observes that it ran two inches higher than the previous day’s. His expanded version of the entry repeats the meteorological detail almost verbatim, suggesting Clark was actively revising and elaborating his field notes.
Gass, by contrast, suppresses any hint of worry. Where Clark describes uneasiness, Gass simply notes that About 11 o’clock Capt. Lewis and three of his party came back to camp.
The sergeant’s prose is procedural, oriented toward the practical decision that follows: the new site is roughly fifteen miles distant, up a small river feeding a southern bay, and will answer very well for winter quarters, as game is very plenty.
Counting the Game: A Telling Discrepancy
A small but revealing inconsistency emerges in the game tallies. Ordway records that Lewis’s party had killed 7 Elk and five Deer,
while Clark—both in his initial entry and his expanded version—reports 6 Elk & 5 Deer.
Gass omits a specific count entirely, mentioning only that game is plentiful. The one-elk discrepancy between Ordway and Clark suggests Ordway may have heard a slightly different report from the returning men, or misremembered when he wrote his entry. Such variations across the journals remind readers that even on matters of plain fact, the expedition’s record is a composite assembled from imperfect witnesses.
Ordway’s entry is the briefest of the three—a single compressed paragraph noting Lewis’s return, the location of the prospective camp, the game killed, and the two men left behind to guard the meat. His phrasing, a tollarable good place for our winters quarters,
conveys a measured, sergeantly assessment that contrasts with Gass’s more decisive will answer very well.
Weather as Narrative Frame
Gass uses the December 5 entry as an opportunity to generalize about the Pacific climate, offering a sweeping retrospective:
There is more wet weather on this coast, than I ever knew in any other place; during a month we have had but 3 fair days; and there is no prospect of a change.
This editorial tone—stepping back from the day’s events to characterize a season—reflects Gass’s published journal’s later orientation toward a reading public. Clark, writing for a documentary record, embeds weather in operational consequences: the southwest wind renders it impossible for me to move with loaded Canoes along an unknown Coast,
and the party remains pinned at camp with wet stores and bedding. Ordway, characteristically, does not mention the weather at all on this date, focusing exclusively on the news Lewis brought.
Read together, the three entries form a layered portrait of a single afternoon: Clark supplies the emotional and tidal context, Gass supplies the climatic frame and a confident endorsement of the new site, and Ordway supplies the terse operational summary. The decision recorded in Clark’s expanded entry—we accordingly deturmined to proceed on to the Situation which Capt. Lewis had Viewed as Soon as the wind and weather Should permit and Comence building huts
—marks the practical beginning of Fort Clatsop, even though wind and rain would delay the actual move for several more days.
