The entries of December 16, 1805 capture a single coastal tempest as it broke over a hunting party returning to the unfinished Fort Clatsop with eleven elk. William Clark led the soaked detachment; John Ordway was among the five men who had been separated overnight without fire; Patrick Gass remained at camp to receive them. The three accounts overlap closely in event but diverge sharply in voice, and reading them together exposes the expedition’s habitual division of narrative labor.
Clark’s Catastrophic Register
Clark’s field entry is the longest and most kinetic of the three, and it strains its own punctuation under the weight of the weather. He records lying in standing water through the night, the return of the lost men, the loading and dispatching of canoes in relays, and a downriver passage made hazardous by falling timber:
The winds violent Trees falling in every derection, whorl winds, with gusts of rain Hail & Thunder, this kind of weather lasted all day, Certainly one of the worst days that ever was!
That superlative — “Certainly one of the worst days that ever was” — is the kind of unguarded judgment Clark permits himself in the field draft but tempers in his fair copy. The second, polished version reproduced here softens the exclamation to “a tempestious disagreeable day” and reorganizes the logistics into clearer sequence: twelve men dispatched for two elk at the second bend, six men sent back for meat left in the woods, three canoes proceeding to the fort. The fair copy also adds a humane detail absent from the rough notes — that the five men who had spent the night exposed presented an appearance “truly distressing.” Clark, in revision, becomes both more administrative and more compassionate.
Ordway from Inside the Ordeal
Ordway is one of the men Clark names — “Ordway Colter Collens, Jo Whitehouse J McNeal” — as having stayed out all night. His own entry is correspondingly first-person and physical, but conspicuously brief:
we Suffered with wet & cold all last night, and could not make fire for everry thing we had was wet.
Where Clark dramatizes the storm with whirlwinds and falling trees, Ordway compresses the night into a single sentence and moves quickly to the morning’s work of loading canoes and ferrying meat to the fort. The sergeant’s instinct is toward task and tally rather than scene; the suffering is acknowledged and then walked past. Notably, Ordway does not mention the Indians who arrived with fish, an encounter that figures in both Clark’s and (by implication, through camp activity) Gass’s frame of reference. His vantage is still that of the woods party, not the fort.
Gass at the Fort: The Outside View
Gass, writing from camp, supplies the third angle. Because he was not on the creek, his account is the most orderly — almost a dispatch:
About 8 Capt. Clarke and 15 men came in loaded with meat; they left a canoe with 7 men to bring in the remainder. They had a very bad night, as the weather was stormy and a great deal of rain fell.
Gass alone fixes a clock time (“About 8”) for the party’s arrival and gives the round numbers — fifteen men in, seven left behind — that Clark’s entry has to be reconstructed to yield. He also identifies the lost detachment by rank rather than name: “a serjeant and four men.” That serjeant is Ordway, but Gass either does not know or does not bother to specify, a reminder that Gass’s published-style summaries habitually strip individuating detail. In return he offers a piece of camp infrastructure the others omit only obliquely: “all hands were set to carrying up the meat, and putting it in a house we had prepared for the purpose.” Clark confirms the meat house in passing (“a house Covered with Punchen & our meat hung up”); Gass treats it as the day’s organizing fact.
Patterns Across the Three
The convergences are precise enough to suggest some cross-checking, or at least shared camp talk: all three note the five men out overnight without fire, the recovery of the meat in stages, and the storm’s severity. The divergences are equally telling. Clark supplies meteorology and emotion; Ordway supplies brevity and bodily fact; Gass supplies time, number, and infrastructure. None invents; each selects. Read in isolation, any one of the three would yield a thinner December 16 than the composite the database now permits.
