The entries of November 29, 1805 capture a single decisive moment in the expedition’s search for winter quarters: with the Columbia’s swells too high for the heavy pirogues, Lewis takes a small Indian-style canoe and five men down the south shore to investigate Indian reports of elk. Four narrators record the day, but each writes from a different vantage point, and the contrasts are instructive.
Lewis Departing, Clark Remaining
Lewis writes briefly and operationally, naming his party with a captain’s precision:
I determined therefore to proceed down the river on it’s E. side in surch of an eligible place for our winters residence and accordingly set out early this morning in the small canoe accompanyed by 5 men. drewyer R. Fields, Shannon, Colter & labiesh.
His entry is a log of decisions and game taken — "4 deer 2 brant a goos and seven ducks" — closing at "an old Indian hunting lodge" that gave tolerable shelter.
Clark, left behind at the cramped neck-of-land camp, writes at far greater length and produces two distinct passages for the same date. Both describe the same canoe departure, but Clark frames it through the danger Lewis evades:
The Swells and waves being too high for us to proceed down in our large Canoes, in Safty
Clark also notices what Lewis has no occasion to mention — the condition of the men staying behind. They are drying leather because "fiew of them have many other Clothes to boste of at this time," and the camp itself is nearly unbearable: "we are Smoked verry much in this Camp."
Gass and Ordway: Compression and Echo
Gass, writing in the published sergeant’s register, compresses Lewis’s mission into a single sentence and adds a practical observation the captains do not:
The hunting is also difficult, the country being full of thickets and fallen timber.
Where Lewis lists the kill and Clark catalogues birds, Gass explains why game "appears scarce" — a terrain judgment from a working hunter’s perspective. He also notes "showers of rain and hail," a detail Ordway corroborates almost verbatim: "Showery and Some hail in the course of the day." The hail appears in neither captain’s entry, suggesting the sergeants were attending to weather phenomena the officers either ignored or folded into a general "rained by showers all day" (Lewis).
Ordway’s entry is the briefest of the four, little more than a notation that the small canoe went downriver to look for winter quarters. The pattern is familiar from earlier in the expedition: Ordway and Gass often share weather language and brief operational summaries, while the captains diverge — Lewis terse and tactical, Clark expansive and observational.
Clark the Naturalist
The most striking divergence is Clark’s second draft of the day, which spills outward from the camp into a full natural-history inventory. After repeating the canoe-departure narrative, he turns to the beach and then to the fauna:
the Shore below the point at our Camp is formed of butifull pebble of various colours. I observe but fiew birds of the Small kind, great numbers of wild fowls of Various kinds, the large Buzzard with white wings, grey and bald eagle’s, large red tailed Hawks, ravens & Crows in abundance, the blue Magpie, a Small brown bird which frequents logs & about the roots of trees
He then catalogues snakes, lizards, "Small bugs, worms, Spiders, flyes & insects of different kinds." None of this appears in Lewis, Gass, or Ordway. The pebble detail is repeated across both of Clark’s drafts, suggesting it impressed him; the editorial footnote in Ordway’s published journal even quotes Clark’s exclamation — "O! how disagreeable is our Situation durcing this dreadfull weather" — a line preserved in manuscript but not in the entries reproduced here.
Read together, the four accounts perform a useful triangulation. Lewis records what was decided and done; Clark records what was endured and observed; Gass supplies the working hunter’s terrain judgment; and Ordway furnishes the spare weather log. The day’s scouting trip would lead, within a week, to the site of Fort Clatsop — but on November 29 the future winter quarters are still only an Indian’s pointed finger toward "a Small Bay which is yet below us."
