The entries dated December 23, 1805 present a puzzle for any reader working across the expedition’s narrators. William Clark describes a wet, thunderous day at the nascent Fort Clatsop on the Pacific coast, trading with visiting Clatsops and moving into a half-finished hut. Patrick Gass, by contrast, writes of dragging canoes 450 yards around a perpendicular pitch at what is plainly the Great Falls of the Columbia — a portage the Corps actually completed in late October. John Ordway’s surviving fragment for the day is too brief to anchor, offering only the phrase “than common this day.” The result is a single calendar date refracted through three incompatible geographies.
Clark at Fort Clatsop: Rain, Trade, and Diplomacy
Clark’s two parallel entries — the field draft and his fair-copy revision — agree closely in substance but diverge in detail, offering a rare side-by-side view of his composition habits. Both record the relentless weather:
rained without intermition all last night, and this day much Thunder in the morning and evening with rain and Some hail to day
Both also document the move into the unfinished huts and the arrival of two Clatsop canoes. The second version, however, expands considerably on ethnographic detail. Where the first entry simply lists “2 bags made with Flags verry neetly made,” the revision specifies that the bags are “nearly Square of different size’s open on one Side” and adds a comparative observation:
I have not observed this method of Secureing fish on any other part of the Columbian waters then that about the Great falls.
The revision also names the sick Indian — Cus-ca-lah — whom the field draft leaves anonymous, and corrects the gift of “Simimon” (persimmon, almost certainly a slip) to “pounded fish.” This is Clark the editor at work: thickening description, naming individuals, and tightening the inventory of trade goods (a panther skin “7 1/2 feet long including the tail,” exchanged for “6 Small fish hooks, a Small worn out file & Some pounded fish”).
Gass Out of Sequence: The Great Falls Portage
Patrick Gass’s entry belongs, by its content, to the Columbia River portage of late October 1805, not to December 23. He describes taking the canoes “over to the south side” on Indian advice, dragging them 450 yards around a 20-foot pitch, and lowering them by cords through falls totaling “37 feet 8 inches, in a distance of 1200 yards.” The latitude he attributes to Lewis’s observation — 45° 42′ 57.3″ N — corresponds to Celilo Falls, hundreds of miles inland from Fort Clatsop.
About the great pitch the appearance of the place is terrifying, with vast rocks, and the river below the pitch, foaming through different channels.
This dislocation almost certainly reflects the editorial history of Gass’s journal, which was prepared for publication by David McKeehan in 1807 from Gass’s original notes. McKeehan’s pagination and dating are known to be imperfect, and the passage here reads as a recycled or misplaced October description. The hydrological reasoning Gass offers — that the river below the falls rises 48 feet because the gorge “cannot discharge the water, as fast as it comes over the falls, until what is deficient in breadth is made up in depth” — is unusually analytical for him and may reflect McKeehan’s polishing as much as Gass’s own observation.
Register and Reliability
Read together, the three sources illustrate the layered nature of expedition documentation. Clark, writing contemporaneously at Fort Clatsop, captures the texture of a specific rainy Monday — the hail, the thunder, the worn-out file traded for a panther skin, the small courtesy of pounded fish sent to a sick man. Gass, mediated through a printer, supplies an engineer’s account of a place the Corps had left weeks earlier. Ordway’s truncated fragment serves as a reminder that not every narrator wrote at length every day, and that what survives is often partial.
For researchers, the date underscores a methodological caution: shared calendar headings do not guarantee shared subject matter. Cross-narrator analysis on December 23, 1805 is less a matter of comparing observations of the same event than of understanding why the journals, taken as a corpus, sometimes speak past one another.
