The expedition spent November 14, 1805 pinned against the north shore of the Columbia estuary, unable to advance because of high swells and unrelenting rain. Three narrators — Patrick Gass, John Ordway, and William Clark — recorded the day, and reading their entries side by side reveals how dramatically register, detail, and narrative ambition diverged among the journal-keepers even when describing identical events.
Compression Versus Expansion
Ordway’s entry is the most compressed of the three, dispatching the day in a few lines. He notes the camp’s misery —
to Stay in this disagreeable harbour with nothing but pounded Sammon to eat
— summarizes Colter’s return, and records that Lewis and four men set out by land. Ordway omits the stolen gig, the Indian visitors, and the broken canoe entirely.
Gass occupies a middle register. He records the broken gun-lock (a detail neither Clark nor Ordway mentions), the recovered gig, and Lewis’s departure with four men. His closing line —
the weather con- tinued wet, and the most disagreeable I had ever seen.
— offers a personal superlative absent from the other accounts. Gass, the carpenter-sergeant, tends to notice equipment: a broken lock, a damaged canoe, a recovered tool.
Clark, by contrast, produces two versions of the day’s events, the second considerably expanded. His entries supply the ethnographic and topographic detail the others omit: the visitors are identified as Wahkiakum, the canoe arrives
thro emence waves & Swells
and Clark reconstructs Colter’s reconnaissance in indirect quotation, even reproducing Colter’s voice:
“it was but a Short distance from where we lay around the point to a butifull Sand beech, which continud for a long ways, that he had found a good harber in the mouth of a creek near 2 Indian Lodges”
The Stolen Gig: Three Tellings
The theft of Colter’s gig is the day’s most revealing test of narrative divergence. Gass reports it neutrally: some Indians had stolen a gig, and Colter recovered it on his return. Ordway omits the incident entirely. Clark, however, narrates it as a small drama with suspicion, gendered observation, and an implied threat of force. He notes that two of the five visitors — the women —
played off in the waves, which induced me to Suspect that they had taken Something from our men below
and recounts that the gig was returned only after
a man run with a gun, as if he intended to Shute them when they landed
This is a meaningfully different account from Gass’s. Where Gass frames the recovery as Colter’s individual action (“the one who returned got it from them again”), Clark frames it as a coordinated camp response involving an armed display. Both versions may be true at different moments, but the contrast shows how Clark’s longer entries often absorb additional context the sergeants either missed or chose not to record.
Lewis’s Departure and the Vancouver Bay
All three narrators record that Lewis set out by land, but only Clark explains why. Gass writes simply that Lewis left
to see if any white people were to be found
Ordway echoes this nearly verbatim — “to go down the River to the Mouth” — a parallel that suggests either shared conversation around camp or the sergeants’ habit of recording the captains’ stated intentions in similar terms. Clark alone names the cartographic objective:
Capt Lewis is object is also to find a Small Bay as laid down by Vancouver just out of the mouth of the Columbia River
The reference to George Vancouver’s 1792 survey signals what the sergeants’ entries do not: that the captains were navigating with a prior chart in hand and trying to reconcile their position with European cartographic knowledge. Clark also names Lewis’s party — Drouillard, Joseph and Reubin Field, and Frazer — where Gass and Ordway give only a head count.
The day’s three records, taken together, illustrate a recurring pattern in the expedition’s documentary record: Ordway abbreviates, Gass attends to material and equipment detail, and Clark layers ethnography, geography, and reconstructed dialogue into entries he sometimes drafts twice. Readers depending on any single narrator would carry away substantially different impressions of what occurred at the storm-bound camp on November 14.
