This analysis was generated with AI assistance and reviewed by a human editor.
The journal entries dated 28 December 1805 present an unusual interpretive puzzle. Clark and Ordway describe activity at the newly established Fort Clatsop on the Netul River, where salt-makers were dispatched to the Pacific coast and rumors of a beached whale circulated among the captains. Gass, by contrast, describes embarking by canoe, halting at a Native village, trading for dogs, and being windbound — a scene that does not match the stationary fort-building work the other two narrators record. The discrepancy is itself revealing: it suggests Gass’s published journal, edited by David McKeehan in 1807, may have been compressed or misdated against the manuscript record preserved by the captains and sergeants.
Clark’s Command Log Versus Ordway’s Rumor
Clark’s entry reads as an administrative ledger. He names the hunters individually — Drewyer, Shannon, Labeash, Reuben Field, and Collins
— and assigns the salt-making detail to Jos. Fields, Bratten, Gibson
, with Willard and Wiser to assist them in Carrying the Kittles to the Sea Coast
. Five of the largest kettles are committed to the operation. The remaining men are kept at the fort putting up pickets & makeing the gates
. Clark’s prose is the prose of a commanding officer accounting for every man under his charge.
Ordway, writing as a sergeant, captures something Clark omits entirely: the previous evening’s report from local Natives.
last night and informed us that a verry large fish was drove to Shore on the coast and that their women wer packing the oil and meat, our offi-Capt Lewis and three men got ready to go with a canoe to See the whail as we expect it is, but the wind and Storm arose So high that they could not go
Ordway’s slip — beginning to write our offi-
before correcting to Capt Lewis
— preserves the immediacy of a working journal. More importantly, his entry is the sole 28 December record of the whale rumor that would, within days, send a party (including Sacagawea) to the coast. Clark, focused on labor assignments, does not mention it. The cross-narrator comparison shows how command-level journals filter out information that subordinate narrators preserve.
Shared Phrasing and a Wet Saturday
Clark’s two paragraphs for the day overlap heavily, suggesting a fair-copy process: the field entry opens rained as usial, a great part of the last night
and the second version opens rained as usial the greater part of the last night
. Both close with the observation that it rained all Day without intermition
and that the Weather verry worm
. Ordway does not echo this weather formula, indicating he was not copying Clark on this date — a useful negative datum for tracing manuscript dependencies among the expedition’s writers.
Clark alone records a personal note that humanizes the labor regime: my man Y. verry unwell from a violent Coald and Strain by Carrying meet from the woods and lifting the heavy logs on the works
. The reference is to York, the enslaved man whom Clark elsewhere calls my boy york
. Neither Ordway nor Gass mentions York’s illness. The detail survives only because Clark, as York’s enslaver, treated his condition as part of the captain’s accounting of available manpower.
The Gass Anomaly
Gass’s published entry describes a wholly different scene: At 8 o’clock we embarked, went about 4 miles and halted at a small village of the natives and got some dogs from them.
He records being stopped by a headwind, some showers of rain
, a deer killed in the evening, and a night spent in a good safe harbour
with Native company. None of this aligns with Clark’s picket-building and salt-detail dispatches at Fort Clatsop. The likeliest explanation is editorial: Gass’s journal, as printed by McKeehan, frequently telescopes or shifts dates relative to the manuscript record, particularly across the unsettled period between the Columbia estuary reconnaissance (mid-November to mid-December) and the formal occupation of Fort Clatsop. The entry as printed appears to belong to an earlier date in the canoe movements along the lower Columbia. Researchers using Gass for 28 December should treat the date heading with caution and corroborate against Clark and Ordway.
Read together, the three narrators model the layered evidentiary structure of the expedition record: a captain’s roster, a sergeant’s rumor-mill, and a printed journal whose chronology must be checked rather than trusted.
