The entries of December 4, 1805, present a revealing case study in how three members of the Corps of Discovery filtered the same day through dramatically different lenses. John Ordway, Patrick Gass, and William Clark all record the dispatch of a hunting party to dress elk killed the previous day, and all note the persistent storm that pinned the main party in place. Yet beyond this shared skeleton of fact, the entries diverge sharply in detail, register, and emotional content.
A Shared Skeleton, Three Densities of Detail
Ordway’s entry is the briefest, a single compressed sentence:
& Six men Set out to go and dress and take care of the Elk meat, continued Storming & high wind all day.
Gass expands only marginally, writing that the
river was so rough, we could not set out with the canoes, and six or seven men were sent to dress the elk that had been killed and take care of the meat. The rain continued all day.
The close parallelism in phrasing — "dress the elk," "take care of the meat," the rain that "continued" — suggests the familiar pattern by which Gass and Ordway, both sergeants, produced kindred accounts of routine camp business. Whether one consulted the other or both simply absorbed the same orders from Clark, their entries function as terse logistical confirmations.
Clark, by contrast, produces two versions of the day, the second considerably elaborated. He names the hunting party’s leader —
I despatched Serjt. Pryer & 6 men to the Elk which he had killed yesterday
— a detail absent from both sergeants’ journals. He records the destination of the meat (a bay below in the next great bend), his own intention to follow once weather permitted, and the strategic purpose: to scout
Some part of which I expected would be convenient for us to make winter quarters
. Where Ordway and Gass register a chore, Clark documents a reconnaissance.
What Only Clark Notices
Three categories of observation appear in Clark’s entry alone. The first is hydrographic: he times high water precisely ("high water at 11 oClock") and notes that
a Spring tide to day rose 2 feet higher than Common flood tides
— exactly the kind of measurement a captain charged with mapping a tidal estuary would prize, and exactly the kind a sergeant on butchering duty would omit.
The second is bodily. Clark candidly reports both discomfort and recovery:
the Smoke is exceedingly disagreeable and painfull to my eyes, my appetite has returned and I feel much better of my late complaint
. Neither Gass nor Ordway alludes to anyone’s health. Clark’s willingness to log his own physical state — a complaint, an appetite returning — gives his journal a diaristic intimacy the sergeants’ entries deliberately avoid.
The third, and most striking, is the note of dread that closes the second draft:
no account of Capt. Lewis. I fear Some accident has taken place in his craft or party
. Lewis was at this moment scouting the south side of the Columbia for a winter site, and Clark’s entry preserves the captain’s private worry over a partner overdue in foul weather. Ordway and Gass, lower in the chain of command, either did not share the anxiety or did not consider it appropriate journal material.
Register and Audience
The differences here are not merely about volume of detail but about audience. Gass, whose journal would be the first published (1807), tends toward a clean narrative line suited to a reading public — weather, work, distances. Ordway’s brevity reflects a soldier’s log. Clark, writing for the captains’ official record and for Jefferson, layers tidal data, strategic intent, and personal observation into a single dense entry, then revises it. The repetition of the spring-tide measurement across both of his drafts shows him refining the language of an observation he considered worth preserving twice.
Read together, the December 4 entries demonstrate how the expedition’s documentary record was produced at multiple registers simultaneously. The same elk, the same rain, and the same stalled canoes generate a sergeant’s logistics, a chronicler’s narrative, and a commander’s reconnaissance journal — each useful, each partial, and each illuminated by the others.
