The 31st of December 1805 finds the Corps of Discovery settling into their newly named winter quarters on the Netul River. Two narrators preserve the day in writing — Sergeant Patrick Gass and Captain William Clark — but the resulting accounts diverge so sharply in length, focus, and register that they read almost as records of different days. Clark devotes a long, observational entry to a delicate trading encounter with visiting Wahkiakum and Skilloot Indians; Gass condenses the same week into a few weather-and-game lines that bleed across the New Year boundary.
Clark’s Trading Day in Detail
Clark’s entry — preserved in two closely parallel drafts — is unusually rich in ethnographic and commercial detail. He inventories what the visiting canoes brought:
Those people brought with them Some Wapto roots, mats made of flags, & rushes, dried fish and Some fiew Shene-tock-we (or black) roots & Dressed Elk Skins, all of which they asked enormous prices for, particularly the Dressed Elk Skins.
The captain names the nations precisely (Wahkiakum and Skilloot), counts the occupants of each canoe, and records his own purchases: wapato, two mats, and a small pouch of native tobacco, paid for with large fish hooks the visitors prized. In his second draft Clark compares the tobacco directly to what the expedition had seen earlier among the Shoshone — a small but telling cross-cultural observation that situates Pacific Coast trade goods within the broader continental economy he had been mapping for months.
Clark also documents a moment of practical diplomacy. A Skilloot man brings in a musket needing repair:
one of those Indeans brought a Musquet to be repared, which only wanted a Screw flattened, for which he gave me a Peck of Wapto roots, I gave him a flint and a pice of Sheep Skin of which he was pleased
The exchange — gunsmithing for wapato, with a flint and sheepskin offered back as gesture — captures the texture of daily Fort Clatsop diplomacy that the broader expedition narrative often elides.
The Sentinel and the “Reform”
The most striking element of Clark’s entry is his reading of Native behavior as transformed by visible military discipline. He notes that the Indians “are much more reserved and better behaved to day than yesterday,” and attributes the change explicitly to the posted guard:
the Sight of our Sentinal who walks on his post, has made this reform in those people who but yesterday was verry impertenant and disagreeable to all
Clark’s second draft sharpens the language, calling the previous day’s visitors “foward impertinant an thieveish” and reporting with satisfaction that the Indians “all Cleared out before the time to Shut the gates, without being derected to doe So.” He follows this with the day’s fortification work: “I derected Sinks to be dug and a Sentinal Box which was accomplished.” Clark is writing here as a commanding officer pleased to see his policy producing visible results — the captain-as-administrator, attentive to discipline, perimeter, and the management of guests.
Gass’s Compression and the Naming of the Fort
Gass, by contrast, offers almost none of this. His published journal collapses late December and early January into a brief passage that crosses the New Year:
wreoespay ist fan. 1806. The year commenced with a wet day; but the weather still continues warm; and the ticks, flies and other insects are in abundance, which appears to us very extraordinary at this season of the year, in a latitude so far north. Two hunters went out this morning. We gave our fortification the name of Fort Clatsop.
Where Clark records trade, Gass records weather and wildlife — the warm winter, the surprising insects, the elk killed three miles from the fort. The single sentence “We gave our fortification the name of Fort Clatsop” preserves the most consequential fact of the week: the christening of the winter post for the neighboring Clatsop people. Clark, oddly, does not mention the naming on the 31st at all in the passages here, though he uses the name himself.
The register difference is characteristic of the two journalists. Gass’s published narrative — heavily edited by David McKeehan in 1807 — favors generalized observation suitable for a reading public: climate, game, headline events. Clark’s field journal, written for the captains’ own record and for eventual official report, captures the granular diplomacy and ethnography that made the expedition’s intelligence-gathering mission viable. Read together, the two entries show how Fort Clatsop’s first week was simultaneously a story of insects and elk and a story of fish hooks, sentinel boxes, and a flattened gun screw.
