The entries dated December 22, 1805, present a revealing contrast among three expedition narrators. William Clark and John Ordway both record a rain-soaked Sunday at the unfinished Fort Clatsop on the Pacific coast, while Patrick Gass’s published journal describes rapids, bulrush lodges, and the mouth of the Snake River—a scene belonging to the previous autumn’s descent of the Columbia. The juxtaposition offers a useful case study in the editorial layering of expedition texts and in the very different documentary registers the three men employed.
Clark and Ordway: A Wet Sunday at the Fort
Clark’s entry is the fullest of the three and characteristically practical. He records continuous rain, the daubing of four huts, the completion of puncheon floors and bunks, and the dispatch of George Drouillard up the creek to set beaver traps. He also notes the human toll of the wet camp:
Sjt. J. Ordway, Gibson & my Servent Sick Several with Biles on them & bruses of different kinds, much of our meat Spoiled.
In a parallel passage Clark elaborates that the spoilage occurred
from the womph of the weather not withstanding a constant Smoke kept under it day and night.
The detail about smoking the meat day and night is the kind of operational note Clark frequently supplies and that other narrators omit. It documents an active preservation effort defeated by the coastal climate—a recurring theme of the Fort Clatsop winter.
Ordway, whom Clark lists among the sick, produces only four words: rainy warm & wet. The brevity is itself information. Ordway, ordinarily a steady daily diarist, was confined by illness, and his terse meteorological note confirms Clark’s weather observation while accounting, perhaps, for his own silence on the day’s labors. Read together, the two entries triangulate the same Sunday: Clark from the perspective of the captain supervising construction and inventorying losses, Ordway from the perspective of a sick sergeant reduced to noting the weather through the walls of a half-finished hut.
Gass’s Displaced Entry
Gass’s entry under this date describes an entirely different landscape:
About 3 miles lower down we came to the first falls or great rapids; and had 1300 yards of a portage over bad ground.
He describes ducks, geese, and gulls at dawn, a large island where the river has cut through a high hill, the mouth of the Sho-sho-ne or Snake-Indian river, and native lodges built of bulrushes and flags, made into a kind of mats. None of this belongs to the Fort Clatsop winter. The geography—the Snake-Columbia confluence, mat lodges, the first major rapids—matches the expedition’s October 1805 descent of the Columbia, not its December encampment near the Pacific.
The discrepancy is a product of the journal’s publication history rather than of Gass’s experience. Gass’s original field notes were rewritten and reorganized for David McKeehan’s 1807 Pittsburgh edition, and the printed text frequently smooths, recombines, or misaligns dated entries. The passage transcribed here under December 22 appears to be a misdated or editorially relocated portion of the autumn Columbia narrative. For researchers, the entry is a reminder that Gass-as-printed is a mediated source, while Clark’s manuscript and Ordway’s journal preserve closer-to-the-moment observation.
Cross-Narrator Patterns
Several patterns emerge from the day’s triangulation. First, register: Clark writes administratively, with named individuals (Drouillard, Ordway, Gibson, his enslaved manservant York) and quantified labor (four huts daubed). Ordway writes telegraphically. Gass—or Gass’s editor—writes in continuous prose aimed at a reading public, supplying ethnographic terms (Sho-sho-ne, Ki-moo-ee-nem) and tidy mileages (18 miles) that the manuscript journals more often render unevenly.
Second, corroboration and silence: Clark and Ordway corroborate the weather and, implicitly, Ordway’s illness. Gass, whose printed entry is geographically displaced, cannot corroborate the day at all, leaving Clark as the sole substantive witness to the construction progress and the spoiling meat.
Third, the spoilage Clark records foreshadows a recurring crisis of the Fort Clatsop winter. Despite continuous smoking, elk meat repeatedly rotted in the mild, saturated coastal air, driving the captains toward salt-making at the coast and toward increased reliance on trade with the Clatsop and Chinook. Clark’s December 22 note is an early entry in that ledger of decay.
