The journal entries from December 2, 1805, capture a single event — Joseph Fields walking into camp with elk marrow bones — but the three surviving narrators frame it through strikingly different lenses. John Ordway offers a one-sentence log; Patrick Gass adds a public-health gloss; William Clark, writing twice, produces the fullest account, framing the kill as both medical relief and geographic milestone.
Compression versus Context
Ordway’s entry is characteristically terse:
went out a hunting, one of them returned towards evening, had killed an Elk Six men went with a canoe after the meat.
He names no hunter, no distance, no significance. The entry functions as a daily ledger. Gass, by contrast, expands the same skeleton with interpretive weight:
A party of the men went out to bring in the meat, which is a very seasonable supply, a number complaining of the bad effects of the fish diet.
Where Ordway records, Gass explains. The phrase “seasonable supply” frames the elk as providential, and the reference to the “fish diet” introduces the medical context that Clark develops at length. Gass also notes a detail neither Ordway nor Clark mentions — that the hunters and the meat party did not return — and closes with a meteorological flourish: “In the evening the weather became clear, and we had a fine night.”
Clark’s Double Entry and the Body in Distress
Clark’s two versions of the day overlap heavily but diverge in revealing ways. The first opens with his own physical state:
I am verry unwell the drid fish which is my only diet does not agree with me and Several of the men Complain of a lax, and weakness
The second version sharpens the diagnosis, naming the cause directly: “I feel verry unwell, and have entirely lost my appetite for the Dried pounded fish which is in fact the cause of my disorder at present.” Clark also upgrades the men’s symptoms from “a lax, and weakness” to “a lax and gripeing” — a more clinical register. The doubled entries suggest revision rather than duplication; Clark appears to be reworking the day’s record, tightening cause and effect.
Clark alone preserves the geographic significance:
This is the first Elk we have killed on this Side the rockey mounts a great deal of Elk Sign in the neighbourhood
Neither Ordway nor Gass marks this milestone. For Clark, the elk is not merely meat but a turning point — a sign that the Pacific slope can sustain the party through winter. His second version adds Fields’s reconnaissance: “Jo Fields givs me an account of a great deel of Elk Sign & Says he Saw 2 Gangs of those Animals in his rout, but it rained So hard that he could not Shoot them.”
What Only Clark Records
Clark’s entries also document a second, failed expedition that Ordway and Gass omit entirely: the canoe party sent up the creek — which Clark names “Ke-ke-mar-que Creek” in the second version — with his enslaved manservant York, in search of fish and fowl. The party returned empty-handed, unable to see fish in the creek and finding the fowl “too wild to be killed.” This omission is telling. Ordway and Gass record only the successful hunt; Clark records the full day, including the contingency that drove it. His decision to dispatch fishing and hunting parties simultaneously reflects the precariousness Gass alludes to but does not detail — a captain hedging against starvation while waiting for Lewis to return with news of whether the country can support a winter encampment.
Read together, the three narrators reveal a familiar hierarchy of expedition documentation: Ordway logs, Gass interprets for a general reader, and Clark — burdened with command — records both the day’s events and the calculations behind them. The single shared fact, Joseph Fields and his marrow bones, takes on its full weight only when the three accounts are layered.
