The 27th of December 1805 found the Corps of Discovery hunkered down at the partially completed Fort Clatsop, with rain falling much as it had for weeks. Three of the expedition’s journal-keepers — Captain William Clark, Sergeant Patrick Gass, and Sergeant John Ordway — recorded the day, and the contrast between their entries reveals not only differences in observational priority but also the distinct registers in which enlisted men and commanding officers approached the same events.
Three Scales of Attention
Ordway’s entry is the most compressed. He notes only that the men finished work on their huts, that “Several Savages came to the Fort,” and that there was “hard rain all day.” Gass devotes his attention almost entirely to ethnography, launching into an extended description of cradleboard head-flattening among the coastal peoples:
A piece of board is placed against the back of the head extending from the shoulders some distance above it; another shorter piece extends from the eye brows to the top of the first, and they are then bound together with thongs or cords made of skins, so as to press back the forehead, make the head rise at the top, and force it out above the ears.
Gass also speculates on linguistic affiliation, suggesting the visitors may speak “a dialect” of Flathead. Notably, neither Clark nor Ordway attempts this kind of comparative ethnology in their entries for the day. Gass — whose published 1807 journal was prepared with editorial assistance — frequently inserts general descriptive passages of this kind, smoothing rough field observation into something approaching natural-history writing for a reading public.
Clark and Ordway: A Question of Copying
The most striking textual relationship is between Clark and Ordway, whose entries on the Clatsop visitors share so much language that direct copying is unmistakable. Both record the chief’s name as “Co-ma wool” (Clark) or “Co-mo wool” (Ordway), both list the same three Indigenous food terms in the same order — Cul ho-mo, Shan-na-tah que / Shaw-na-tah-que, and Shel-well / Shele well — and both describe the gifts presented in return: a sheepskin cap from Lewis to the chief, ear bobs and ribbon from Clark to the chief’s son. Ordway’s version, however, is slightly more polished and adds a comparative detail Clark omits, noting that the black root “is cured in a kill like the pash-a-co above.”
Both men also close with nearly identical language about the welcome change in diet:
Those roots & berres, are greatfull to our Stomcks as we have nothing to eate but Pore Elk meet, nearly Spoiled.
Ordway renders the same observation as “timely and extreamly greatfull to our Stomachs, as we have nothing to eate but Spoiled Elk meat.” The shared phrasing strongly suggests Ordway worked from Clark’s notes — a pattern documented elsewhere in the expedition record — though he occasionally tightens or expands a passage as he transcribes.
The December Mosquito
One small detail unites Clark and Ordway and is absent from Gass: the mosquito. Clark writes plainly, “I Saw a Musquetor which I Showed Capt. Lewis,” and adds at the end, “Musquetors troublesom.” Ordway elaborates the same incident with notable scientific caution:
I Showed Capt L. 2 Musquetors to day, or an insect So much the Size Shape and appearance of a Musquetor that we Could observe no kind of differance.
Here Ordway is more careful than Clark, hedging on the identification rather than asserting it. Whether this reflects his own caution or a refinement introduced after consulting Lewis is unclear, but it is one of the few moments where Ordway’s entry contains an observation more precise than Clark’s. The mid-winter sighting itself is striking — a reminder that the Pacific coastal climate, however miserably wet, was mild enough to keep insects active in late December.
Register and Audience
Read together, the three entries illustrate how differently expedition members translated a shared day into prose. Clark writes as a commanding officer logging assignments — Drewyer, Shannon, and Labiche to hunt; Joseph Field, Bratton, and Gibson to make salt at Point Adams; Willard and Wiser to assist with the kettles. Ordway, working in part from Clark, produces a smoother but derivative account. Gass, freed from the captain’s administrative concerns, reaches instead toward the kind of ethnographic generalization his eventual readers would expect. The result is three windows on a single rainy Friday — overlapping but never identical.
