The entries of November 17, 1805, capture the Corps in a moment of pause along the south shore of the Columbia estuary, awaiting Captain Lewis’s return from his reconnaissance of Cape Disappointment. Both Patrick Gass and William Clark record the same skeleton of events — hunters dispatched, Lewis’s party returning at midday, Chinook visitors at camp — but the two narrators diverge sharply in what they choose to elaborate. Gass turns ethnographer and accountant; Clark turns diplomat and logistician.
Two Registers on a Quiet Day
Clark’s entry, which survives in two closely related drafts, foregrounds the surf and the tide as the day’s defining physical fact. He notes that the tide
rises 8 feet 6 Inches at this place, comes in with high Swells which brake on the Sand Shore with great fury.
That measurement — precise, repeated in both drafts — is characteristic of Clark’s surveyor’s habit of mind. He follows it with a careful tally of the day’s hunt (three deer, brant, ducks) and a roster of the men who volunteered to accompany him on the next day’s overland excursion to the ocean: Pryor, Ordway, the Field brothers, Shannon, Colter, Bratton, Wiser, Charbonneau, and York. The list is administrative, the prose functional.
Gass, by contrast, devotes the bulk of his entry to ethnographic observation, lingering on the dress of Chinook women in a passage whose tone is unusual among the journals:
The women have a kind of fringe petticoats, made of filaments or tassels of the white cedar bark wrought with a string at the upper part, which is tied round the waist. These tassels or fringe are of some use as a covering, while the ladies are standing erect and the weather calm; but in any other position, or when the wind blows, their charms have but a precarious defence.
The arch, almost mock-genteel diction (“the ladies… their charms”) is Gass’s own — or, more likely, the heavy hand of David McKeehan, who edited Gass’s journal for publication in 1807. Clark notes the Chinook visitors but says nothing whatever about their clothing. The cedar-bark skirt is precisely the kind of detail Clark routinely omits and Gass (or his editor) routinely amplifies for an Eastern reading audience.
The Politics of the Gift
Where Gass observes, Clark negotiates. Both drafts of Clark’s entry record that the Chinook arrived by canoe with wapato and a boiled root resembling licorice, presented as gifts. Clark’s reaction is revealing:
in return for which we gave more than the worth to Satisfy,them a bad practice to receive a present of Indians, as they are never Satisfied in return.
The second draft sharpens the complaint: the Chinook “are never Satisfied for what they reive in return if ten time the value of the articles they gave.” Clark reads the exchange through the lens of European commercial reciprocity and finds it unbalanced; he does not entertain the possibility that what he calls a “present” operates within a different protocol of obligation and prestige. Gass mentions none of this friction. He notes only that
A number of both sexes keep about our camp; some have robes made of muskrat skins sewed together and I saw some of loon-skins.
The loon-skin robe is a detail Clark misses entirely. Read together, the two narrators offer a fuller picture than either alone: Clark supplies the diplomatic strain, Gass the material culture.
A Continent in Miles
The most striking feature of Gass’s November 17 entry is not the day’s narrative at all but the appended Memorandum tabulating the distance, leg by leg, from the canoe deposit near the head of the Missouri to Cape Disappointment and beyond — a total of 4,133 miles when added to the 3,096-mile ascent of the Missouri. The table runs from the Shoshone river through Travellers-rest creek, the Kooskooske, the Kimooeenem, Lewis’s river, the Great Falls, the Short and Long Narrows, the Grand Shoot, Quicksand river, Shallow Bay, Blustry Point, Chinook river, and Cape Disappointment, closing with the ten miles of “Capt. Clarke’s tour N. W. along coast” — the very excursion Clark is, on this date, still organizing.
That Gass (or McKeehan) inserts the memorandum here, on the eve of Clark’s coastal walk, gives the day a summary quality the workaday Clark entry lacks. Clark is still in the field, recording tide heights and assembling a party. Gass is already counting the miles of an expedition that, in his telling, has reached its furthest point. The two registers — Clark’s prospective, Gass’s retrospective — sit side by side on the same calendar day, and the gap between them is one of the more revealing in the November record.
