December 20, 1805 found the Corps of Discovery in the midst of constructing Fort Clatsop, their winter quarters near the Pacific. Two narrators — Sergeant Patrick Gass and Captain William Clark — left accounts of the day. Although both men describe the same weather and the same roofing labor, their entries differ markedly in scope, register, and what each chose to preserve for the record.
Shared Labor, Shared Weather
Both narrators open with the storm. Clark notes
Some rain and hail last night and this morning it rained hard untill 10 oClock
before describing the men
all employd Carrying Punchens and Covering Cabins 4 of which we had Covered
. Gass corroborates the labor in his retrospective summary, recalling that the party
collected all the puncheons or slabs we had made and some which we got from some Indian huts up the bay
— a telling detail Clark omits. Where Clark catalogs the day in isolation, Gass collapses December 20 into a longer narrative arc that reaches forward to Christmas Eve:
From this day to the 25th we had occasionally rain and high winds, but the weather still continued warm. On the evening of the 24th we got all our huts covered and daubed.
The difference reflects the two men’s compositional habits. Gass — or rather the editor David McKeehan, who reworked Gass’s manuscript for the 1807 Pittsburgh edition — favors summary passages that compress several days into a single observation. Clark, working in the field, dates each entry tightly and resists looking ahead. Gass’s mention of scavenging slabs from abandoned Indian huts is the kind of practical detail a sergeant overseeing the work would notice and a captain composing a more formal log might pass over.
The Trading Encounter Clark Records — and Gass Omits
The most striking divergence is the visit of three Clatsop traders. Clark devotes the second half of his entry to them, and his two surviving versions of the day (a field note and a fuller journal copy) both preserve the encounter at length. The traders brought
Lickorish Sackacomie berries & mats to Sell
in the first version and
mats, roots & Sackacome berries
in the second — a small variation suggesting Clark refined his recollection between drafts.
Clark’s frustration is plain. He complains that
Those people ask double & tribble the value of everry thing they have to Sell, and never take less than the full value of any thing
. The expanded version sharpens the ethnographic point: the Clatsops
prise only Blue & white heeds, files fish hooks and Tobacco
, with
Tobacco and blue beeds principally
as preferred goods. Clark also notes that the files were valued because the Clatsops used them
to Sharpen their tools
— an observation about Indigenous adaptation of European trade items that anticipates later ethnographic interest in the Lower Columbia trade network.
Gass says nothing of this encounter. Whether the sergeant was elsewhere on the building site, whether McKeehan trimmed it as commercially uninteresting, or whether Gass simply judged it less important than the roofing progress, the omission illustrates how much depends on which narrator one consults. A reader with only Gass’s published volume would have no idea that trade negotiations occurred on December 20 at all.
Register and Reliability
The two captains’ clerks and sergeants frequently echo one another in this expedition’s documentary record, but December 20 is not a day of copying. Clark’s two versions resemble each other closely — the second is a polished expansion of the first — while Gass’s account stands independent, with its own emphasis on materials and weather across multiple days. Read together, the entries demonstrate the necessity of cross-narrator analysis for any single date: Gass supplies the salvaged-slab detail and the multi-day weather pattern, while Clark preserves the trading visit, the Clatsop pricing strategy, and the hierarchy of preferred trade goods. Neither account, taken alone, gives the full day.
