The entries for November 28, 1805 offer one of the clearest demonstrations in the expedition’s record of how a shared experience could be flattened, expanded, or transfigured depending on the hand holding the quill. Camped on the south shore of the Columbia, pinned down by gales and searching unsuccessfully for a winter site, the captains and enlisted men endured a day of rotten tents, soaked stores, and empty kettles. John Ordway, Patrick Gass, and William Clark each recorded it — and the differences among their entries reveal as much about authorial temperament and social position as about the weather itself.
Compression and Expansion
Ordway’s entry is almost telegraphic. He notes the wind direction, the failed hunt, and the rain in a single breath:
the N. West. Several men went out to hunt but killed nothing hard rain all day.
Gass, writing from a similar enlisted-man’s vantage, expands only slightly, but adds a detail that neither Ordway nor Clark thought to preserve — the practical expedient by which the party drank:
It rained all day; and we had here no fresh water but what was taken out of the canoes as the rain fell.
This is a small but telling instance of Gass noticing what Clark, the commanding eye, omits. Clark catalogues the rotting robes, the worn lodge, the holed sails-turned-tents, and the pounded fish from the Great Falls, but does not mention that the canoes themselves had become rain barrels. The detail belongs to the man who would have fetched the water, not the man who would have ordered it fetched.
Clark’s Two Drafts and the Rhetoric of Suffering
Clark’s entry survives in two versions, and comparing them shows a writer reaching deliberately for emphasis. Both record the wind shift, the rotten coverings, the unapproachable swans and brant, and the diet reduced to pounded fish. Both end with the exclamation of suffering. But the field draft heightens the language of catastrophe: where the second version says the wind blew with “such violence that I expected every moment to See trees taken up by the roots,” the field draft adds that this lasted “for 15 or 20 minits” at a stretch and that the squalls were “Suckceeded by rain.” Clark also escalates his summary cry. The second version reads:
O! how disagreeable is our Situation dureing this dreadfull weather.
The field version reaches for something larger:
O how Tremendious is the day.
The shift from “disagreeable” to “Tremendious” is characteristic of Clark’s storm prose — a register he reserves for moments when the expedition’s command of its own circumstances has visibly broken down. Neither Ordway nor Gass permits himself this mode. Their journals record the storm; Clark’s journal performs it.
Patterns of Dependence and Independence
The shared opening — wind from the southwest, hard rain, hunters out without success — suggests the routine cross-pollination of camp talk that produced overlapping enlisted-men’s entries throughout the expedition. Ordway and Gass agree closely on the bare facts and diverge only in Gass’s water-from-canoes observation. Clark’s entry, by contrast, is independent in vocabulary and structure even where it covers the same ground. He alone names the pounded fish from “the Great falls,” he alone inventories the decaying equipment, and he alone tracks the precise hour (“about 12 oClock”) at which the wind veered to the northwest.
The three entries together form a useful triangulation. Ordway gives the skeleton; Gass adds the practical texture of survival; Clark supplies both the inventory of want and the emotional register that converts a wet day into a passage of expedition literature. Read alone, each entry is partial. Read together, they document not only November 28, 1805, but the differing functions a journal could serve — log, record, lament — within a single command.
