December 30, 1805 marks a threshold in the expedition’s winter encampment on the Pacific slope: the day the fort’s pickets and gates were completed, the day a routine of nightly closure was announced to visiting Chinookan neighbors, and the day a successful elk hunt relieved the spoiled meat stores. Three narrators—William Clark, Patrick Gass, and John Ordway—record the day’s events, and the differences in their entries reveal much about each man’s purpose, audience, and powers of observation.
A Shared Skeleton: Weather, Hunters, Pickets
All three narrators agree on the day’s central facts in nearly identical sequence: a hard wind and rain overnight, a rare interval of sunshine, the return of hunters with four elk, a recovery party dispatched, and the completion of the fort. The convergence is striking enough to suggest the sergeants and the captain were comparing notes—or at least working from a shared oral summary at day’s end.
Ordway’s account is the most spare, focused on the practical military business of the post:
we finished puting up our pickets and gates of the fort, about 2 oClock P. M. three hunters came to the fort had killed 4 Elk. Seven men Set out immediately and brought in the meat, a centinel placed in the fort to look out for the Savages for our Safety, &C.
Ordway alone mentions the sentinel—a detail consistent with his role as a sergeant attentive to guard duty. Gass, also a sergeant, reports the same hunt in nearly identical language but adds an evaluative note Ordway omits:
Seven men went out immediately and brought them into the fort safe, which was a pleasing sight, the meat we had on hand being spoiled.
Gass supplies the reason the elk were welcome; Ordway leaves the larder unmentioned. Both sergeants close with the same triumphant fact—the fortification is finished—but neither dwells on it.
Clark’s Wider Lens
Clark’s entry, by contrast, runs to roughly three times the length of either sergeant’s and pursues several threads the others ignore entirely. Where Ordway and Gass merely note the hunters’ return, Clark names Drouillard as their leader and lingers over the meal:
they returned at Dusk, with the 4 Elk, of which we had a Sumptious Supper of Elk Tongues & marrow bones which was truly gratifying.
More importantly, Clark records an entire diplomatic episode the sergeants pass over in silence. Four Indians from the upper Wahkiakum village arrived offering roots; Clark explains the captains’ refusal as a matter of price rather than of need:
their expectations for those presents of a fiew roots is 3 or 4 times their real worth
He then frames the new closing-time policy as an explicit announcement to the visitors:
at Sun Set we let The Indians know that, our Custom will be to Shut the gates at Sun Set, at which time, they must all go out of the fort
His characterization of the departing guests as "verry foward and disegreeable" who "left the huts with reluctianc" supplies social texture absent from the sergeants’ versions. Gass and Ordway record the fort being closed; only Clark records what closing it meant for the people on the other side of the gate.
The Naturalist’s Postscript
Clark’s entry concludes with a passage that has no analogue in either sergeant’s journal—a brief naturalist’s coda noting unseasonable signs of life:
I Saw flies & different kinds of insects in motion to day Snakes are yet to be seen, and Snales without Cover is Common and large, fowls of every kind Common to this quarter abound in the Creek & Bay near us
This is the register that most distinguishes Clark from his sergeants on this date: a captain’s awareness that the journals must serve scientific as well as administrative ends. The mild Pacific winter, evidenced by active insects and shell-less slugs in late December, is precisely the sort of climatic observation Jefferson’s instructions had solicited. Gass and Ordway, writing for themselves and perhaps for eventual publication of a soldier’s narrative, had no such mandate; their December 30 ends when the gates close. Clark’s continues into the wet woods beyond.
Patterns of Convergence and Divergence
The near-identical phrasing shared by Gass and Ordway on the hunters and the recovery party suggests the sergeants drew on a common source—likely a shared evening conversation or a circulating note. Yet each preserves a distinctive small detail: Ordway the sentinel, Gass the spoiled meat. Clark, working from his own observation and from his role at the center of the day’s diplomacy, produces an entry that not only encompasses the sergeants’ material but extends it into ethnography, cuisine, and natural history. Read together, the three accounts show how Fort Clatsop’s first complete day was simultaneously a military accomplishment, a domestic relief, and a renegotiation of the expedition’s relationship with its Chinookan hosts.
