By 11 November 1805 the Corps of Discovery had spent four days battered against a narrow shelf on the north bank of the Columbia estuary, unable to round the point ahead in canoes ill-suited to the swells. Two journal-keepers — William Clark, writing at length and in two overlapping drafts, and Sergeant Patrick Gass, writing briefly — describe the same miserable camp. Read side by side, their entries reveal how rank, literacy, and temperament shaped what each man chose to set down.
The Same Camp, Two Registers
Gass opens with the practical problem of shelter, noting that the party had “no tents, or covering to defend us, except our blankets and some mats we got from the Indians, which we put on poles to keep off the rain.” His sentences are short, his focus logistical: fires built, mats rigged, lodges abandoned at high tide and reoccupied when it ebbed. He closes with a small triumph — men sent “about 40 perches up the river” returned with fifteen fine fish.
Clark, writing the same hours, produces something closer to a sustained complaint. Where Gass measures distance in perches and counts fish, Clark measures suffering in days:
we are truly unfortunate to be Compelled to lie 4 days nearly in the Same place at a time that our day are precious to us
His prose accumulates hazards rather than tallying remedies. The trees the party camped on were “all on flote for about 2 hours from 3 untill 5 oClock P M”; the saturated hillside loosed stones that “fall on us”; canoes lay “at the mercy of the waves” while baggage and men were scattered “on drift trees of emense Sizes.” Gass mentions the high tide that drove them from their lodges in a single clause; Clark returns to it twice, the second time in a near-identical passage in his field notes and his fair-copy entry — evidence of how he reworked the day’s observations rather than copying another journalist.
The Indian Traders: A Detail Gass Omits
The most striking divergence is the visit of five Indians at midday. Gass does not mention them at all. Clark devotes the central paragraph of his entry to the encounter, recording that the visitors came down in a canoe “loaded with fish of Salmon Spes. Called Red Charr,” of which the captains purchased thirteen for “fishing hooks & some trifling things.” In his second draft Clark goes further, identifying the visitors as members of a nation who “call themselves Call-har-ma,” living above and across the river, and noting that their language resembled that of the previous nation encountered.
Clark also lingers on a detail that fascinated him — the seamanship of the Columbia peoples. Watching the small canoe recross a five-mile-wide river in a gale, he writes:
I ever Saw a Small vestle ride, their Canoe is Small, maney times they were out of Sight before the were 2 miles off Certain it is they are the best canoe navigators I ever Saw
This is ethnographic observation under duress, and it is exactly the sort of material Gass, charged with no such documentary mission, lets pass. Clark also records the cultural marker of contact with maritime traders downriver: one of the visitors wore “an old Salors Jacket & Trouses,” the others elk-skin robes — physical evidence that European or American vessels lay just beyond the point the expedition could not yet round.
Two Drafts, One Hand
Clark’s two versions of the entry, often printed together in modern editions, illustrate his working method. The field-note version is rougher and more associative, breaking off mid-sentence (“The Wind Shifted to ____”) where he could not recall a compass bearing. The fair copy reorders the events — placing the hunter Joseph Fields’s failed reconnaissance first, then the Indian visit, then the description of the camp — and adds the ethnonym Call-har-ma. Both versions retain the same vivid closing image of the party “Scattered on floating logs and Such dry Spots as can be found.” The repetition across drafts, rather than between narrators, suggests Clark composed independently of Gass; the sergeant’s terser entry shows none of Clark’s signature phrasings.
Together the two records preserve complementary truths about 11 November: Gass’s practical economy of shelter and food, and Clark’s broader anxiety about time lost, danger pressing in from hillside and tide, and the unfamiliar peoples whose skill on the water exceeded anything he had witnessed.
