By November 13, 1805, the Corps of Discovery had been pinned for days on the north shore of the Columbia estuary, hemmed in by mountains, drift timber, and the relentless swell of the lower river. Three journals survive from this day — those of William Clark, Patrick Gass, and John Ordway — and together they reveal how differently the same wet, frustrating Wednesday could be told.
A Shared Event, Three Registers
All three narrators record the central decision of the day: dispatching three men in an Indian canoe to scout downriver toward the sea. The accounts converge on the essentials but diverge sharply in tone and detail. Gass writes with the clipped practicality that characterizes his published journal:
At 9 o’clock in the forenoon it became a little more calm than usual ; and 3 men took a canoe, which we got from the Indians of a kind excellent for riding swells, and set out to go to the point on the sea shore, to ascertain whether there were any white people there or if they were gone.
Ordway, characteristically terser, places the departure in the afternoon rather than the forenoon and frames the mission as open-ended discovery rather than a search for white traders:
in the afternoon three men Set out in the Small canoe in order to go down towards the mouth of the River and see what discovrees they could make, as the wind continues So high that obledges us to stay.
Clark agrees with Gass that the canoe was Indian-built and “calculated to ride high Swells,” but his version of the mission is more pragmatic still: the men were to “examine if they can find the Bay at the mouth & good barbers [harbors] below for us to proceed in Safty.” The disagreement over time of departure (Gass: 9 a.m.; Ordway: afternoon) and over purpose (Gass: looking for white people; Ordway: general reconnaissance; Clark: searching for safe harbor) suggests that none of the three was directly involved in the dispatch, and each reconstructed the event from camp talk.
Clark Alone on the Mountain
What sets Clark’s entry apart is everything Gass and Ordway omit. While the sergeants summarize the weather and the canoe party, Clark hauls himself up the first spur of the coastal mountains in a punishing solo reconnaissance:
I walked to the top of the first part of the mountain with much fatigue as the distance was about 3 miles thro intolerable thickets of Small Pine, arrow wood a groth much resembling arrow wood with briers, growing to 10 & 15 feet high interlocking with each other & Furn, aded to this difficulty the hill was So Steep that I was obliged to drawing my Self up in many places by the bowers.
Clark’s purpose, he explains, was “to view the river below” — a captain’s instinct to see beyond the cove that confined the party. The cloud cover defeats the view, but the climb yields a small harvest of natural-history observation that neither sergeant records: a measured spruce “14 feet around and verry tall” (in his second draft, trees “more than 200 feet high & from 8 to 10 feet through at the Stump”), a small red berry growing in bunches with an “insiped” taste, persistent hail still visible from two nights before, and elk sign on the ridge.
Hardship, Domestic Friction, and the Captain’s Voice
Clark’s draft also admits material that the sergeants’ more public-facing journals would not. He notes, parenthetically and almost in passing, that “Squar” — Sacagawea — was “displeased with me for not” something (the sentence trails off, perhaps deliberately), one of the rare glimpses in the journals of friction within the leadership’s small domestic circle. He records cutting his hand. He catalogs the diet: nothing but “Pounded fish which we have as a reserve See [sea] Store, and what Pore fish we can kill up the branch on which we are encamped.” And he closes with an uncharacteristically anxious projection:
if we were to have cold weather to accompany the rain which we have had for this 6 or 8 days passed we must eneviatilbly Suffer verry much as Clothes are Scerce with us.
Gass and Ordway, writing for eventual publication and bound by the conventions of the enlisted journal, register the rain and the wind but not the worry. The pattern is consistent across November 1805: Clark’s field notes carry the texture of the expedition’s lived discomfort — wet clothes, cut hands, irritated companions, dwindling rations — while the sergeants’ entries preserve the skeleton of events. Read together, the three accounts of November 13 show the same storm-bound camp from three vantages: Gass’s orderly summary, Ordway’s bare chronicle, and Clark’s wet, exhausted, observant interior.
