December 14, 1805, was a working Saturday at the half-built fort the Corps would soon name for the Clatsop nation. Three narrators — Sergeant John Ordway, Sergeant Patrick Gass, and Captain William Clark — each set down an account of the day. Read together, the entries reveal not only a shared accomplishment (the completion of the log walls) but also the distinct preoccupations and writerly habits of each man.
A Shared Milestone, Three Registers
All three journalists agree on the day’s central fact: the log work of the huts was finished, and attention turned to roofing and to a dedicated meat house. Ordway is the most economical, reducing the day to a builder’s tally:
tinued on with the huts. 2 men employed Splitting out plank to cover our huts with, we finished raiseing the other line of huts & began covring one room for a meat house.
Clark, writing as commanding officer, frames the same labor in administrative language — “we finish the log works of our building” — and folds in the day’s diplomatic and logistical business: the departure of the Indian visitors, the sale of “a Small Sea otter Skin and a roabe,” and the dispatch of four men to guard elk killed earlier in the woods. Notably, Clark’s two surviving versions of the entry track each other almost verbatim in their opening clauses, a reminder that he often drafted a field note and then expanded it into a fuller journal entry. The expanded version adds the order that the four men “delay untill the party goes up tomorrow” — a planning detail absent from the shorter draft.
Gass the Carpenter, Clark the Quartermaster
Where Ordway counts and Clark commands, Gass — a trained joiner before the expedition — lingers on the materials themselves. His is the only entry that specifies the number of completed huts (“7 in number”) and the only one to celebrate the local timber:
we have found a kind of timber in plenty, which splits freely and makes the finest puncheons I have ever seen. They can be split 10 feet long and 2 broad, not more than an inch and an half thick.
This is the voice of a craftsman appraising a windfall. Ordway notes only that two men are “Splitting out plank”; Gass tells the reader why the work is going better than expected. He also offers the day’s only weather comparison of substance, observing that despite the rain “the weather here still continues warm, and there has been no freezing except a little white frost” — a meteorological judgment Clark, focused elsewhere, does not make.
Clark’s preoccupations lie instead with provisions and bodies. He alone records the bad news that shadows the construction triumph:
all our last Supply of Elk has Spoiled in the repeeted rains which has been fallen ever Since our arrival at this place, and for a long time before, Scerce one man in Camp Can host of being one day dry Since we landed at this point
This sentence reframes the meat house under construction not as routine carpentry but as urgent infrastructure: the previous cache has rotted, and men have been continuously wet. Clark closes with the sick list — improving generally, but “my man York Sick with Cholick & gripeing.” Neither Gass nor Ordway mentions York’s illness or the spoiled elk.
What Each Narrator Sees
The cross-narrator pattern for December 14 is a familiar one in the Fort Clatsop journals. Ordway tends toward the brief operational note — what was done, by how many men, on what task. Gass, whose published 1807 journal was edited by David McKeehan, supplies the technical and environmental specifics that interest a builder and a reader at home: dimensions of puncheons, count of huts, character of the climate. Clark’s journals carry the weight of command — Indian relations, dispatched parties, food security, and the health of individual men, including the enslaved York, whose suffering is registered only in the captain’s hand.
None of the three contradicts the others. Rather, each entry foregrounds a different layer of the same wet Saturday: the task list, the materials, and the worry. Together they offer a fuller picture than any one could alone of the Corps’ transition from travelers to winter occupants on the Pacific slope.
This analysis was AI-assisted and reviewed by a human editor.
