The expedition had been pinned along the south shore of the Columbia for days, scouting a winter camp and waiting out weather that refused to break. On November 22, 1805, a violent storm out of the south-southeast turned their exposed position into a soaked and battered ordeal. Two narrators left accounts of the day: Sergeant Patrick Gass, whose published journal compresses the event into a few practical sentences, and Captain William Clark, who returns to the day twice — once in his field notes and again in a slightly polished fair-copy entry. Read together, the entries reveal how differently rank, literary ambition, and immediate purpose shaped the expedition’s documentary record.
Same Storm, Different Registers
Gass’s entry is characteristically lean. He notes that the party could not set out, that the wind blew hard from the south, and that the river was rougher than at any time since their arrival. He reports the practical damage with the eye of a working carpenter:
At noon the tide was higher than common, and one of our canoes got among some logs, and was split. The rain and wind continued all day violent.
Clark, by contrast, reaches for exclamation. His field entry registers the storm as a bodily and emotional assault:
before day the wind increased to a Storm from the S. S. E. and blew with violence throwing the water of the river with emence waves out of its banks almost over whelming us in water, O! how horriable is the day
The same canoe Gass mentions appears in Clark’s account as well — “one Canoe Split by the Tossing of those waves” — but Clark embeds it in a sweeping picture of waves and breakers flying over the camp itself. Where Gass tallies, Clark dramatizes. The shared detail of the split canoe anchors both accounts to the same physical event, but the surrounding prose belongs to two different temperaments.
Clark Revising Clark
Clark’s two versions of the entry offer a rare side-by-side glimpse of his own editorial habits. The field draft begins, “Some little rain all the last night with wind,” while the fair copy upgrades the weather to “a moderate rain all the last night with wind.” The exclamation “O! how horriable is the day” survives in both, but the fair copy expands the scene with literary parallelism — “waves brakeing with great violence against the Shore throwing the Water into our Camp.” The fair copy also adds a culinary judgment absent from the field notes: that the wapato roots purchased from the visiting Indians “are equal to the Irish potato, and is a tolerable Substitute for bread.” Clark, writing for a future readership, supplies the comparative detail his rougher draft omits.
Most striking is how the closing reflection on Indian relations evolves. The field draft observes simply that “we find the Indians easy ruled and kept in order by a Stricter indifference towards them.” In the fair copy, Clark personalizes and rationalizes the policy, attributing the Indians’ “great propriety” to a specific earlier threat he had made and to his deliberate indifference. The revision shows Clark consciously shaping his record into argument, not merely description.
What Gass Leaves Out
Gass’s silence is also telling. He says nothing of the Indian visitors who, in Clark’s telling, crowded the men’s shelters even at the height of the storm. He records no purchase of wapato, no exchange of brass armbands and rings, no reflection on diplomacy. For Gass on this day, the storm is a weather event and a damaged canoe; for Clark, it is simultaneously a meteorological catastrophe, a trade encounter, and an occasion to theorize about managing relations with the Lower Columbia peoples.
The contrast is partly one of role. Clark, as co-commander, was responsible for the diplomatic and ethnographic record; Gass, as sergeant, was tracking the operational state of the party. But the divergence also reflects the documentary layering of the expedition itself: a single stormy Friday on the Columbia survives in the archive as a terse logbook note, an anguished field jotting, and a polished captain’s narrative — three texts that together capture more than any one of them could alone.
