The entries of William Clark, Patrick Gass, and John Ordway for December 8, 1805 describe the same coordinated operation — Clark’s reconnaissance toward the Pacific shore and a meat-recovery party returning to the new Fort Clatsop site — but the three accounts diverge sharply in length, register, and observational priority. Read together, they expose how labor was divided among the journal-keepers as plainly as it was divided among the men.
Two Parties, Three Scales of Detail
Ordway gives the day in five sentences. He records the frost, the dispatch of “12 men was dispached with two canoes after Elk meat,” Clark’s departure with five men “in order to blaze a road and look out a place to make Salt &C.,” and the meat party’s safe return. His entry functions as an administrative roster — who went where, with what result — and ends with the formulaic “we formed an Encampment &C.”
Gass, who himself led the meat-retrieval detail, narrates from inside that assignment. He traces the route precisely:
We went up the small river in our canoes about two miles, then up a branch of it on the west side two miles, then by land about two miles more, where we found the men and the meat, of which we all carried two large loads to our canoes, and proceeded down to camp.
Where Ordway writes “after Elk meat,” Gass measures the work in miles and loads. He then steps back to describe the country in the surveyor’s idiom he favors throughout the expedition: “closely timbered with spruce-pine, the soil rich, but not deep; and there are numerous springs of running water.” Gass also notes what neither Ordway nor Clark mentions on this date — distant mountains to the south with snow on them.
Clark’s Double Entry and the Bogs
Clark wrote the day twice, and the two versions are themselves instructive. The first, more telegraphic field entry tracks bearings and landmarks: “Steered S 62° W at 2 miles passed the head of a Brook running to the right.” The second, expanded version reframes the same march with a stated purpose:
my principal object is to look out a place to make Salt, blaze the road or rout that they men out hunting might find the direction to the fort if they Should get lost in cloudy weather-and See the probibillity of game in that direction, for the Support of the Men
This is the strategic logic Ordway compresses into a single phrase. Clark’s revised version supplies the rationale; Ordway supplies only the result.
Where Clark’s two drafts most vividly converge — and where his account departs furthest from his companions’ — is in the description of the coastal bogs. The field entry calls them “emence bogs” through which the party pursued elk “over 4 Small Knobs.” The expanded version pushes further into bodily detail:
it is almost incredeable to assurt the bogs which those animals Can pass through, I prosue’d this gang of Elk through bogs which the wate of a man would Shake for 1/2 an Acre, and maney places I Sunk into the mud and water up to my hips without finding any bottom on the trale of those Elk.
Both Clark drafts note the cranberries growing in the moss, a detail neither Gass nor Ordway records. Clark also notes the bearing of the rafted creek — “runs in a direction to Point adams” — fixing his reconnaissance to the coastal geography the captains had been charting since their arrival at the estuary.
Register and Reliance
The three accounts do not appear to copy from one another on this date. Ordway’s brevity and his use of the passive “was dispached” suggest he wrote from camp without firsthand knowledge of either expedition; his entry reads like a daily log compiled from report. Gass writes from the meat party he personally led and confines himself to that experience, mentioning Clark’s departure only in a single opening clause. Clark, alone among the three, writes from the reconnaissance itself, and only Clark records the wading, the rafting, the sinking to the hips, and the elk-skin shelter.
The convergence comes in small shared notes — the morning frost (Gass and Ordway), the lofty spruce-pine timber (Gass and Clark), the evening rain (Gass and Clark) — details consistent enough across independent observers to suggest accurate reporting rather than textual borrowing. For December 8, the three journals function as complementary rather than overlapping documents: an administrative summary, a hunter-surveyor’s route log, and a captain’s reconnaissance narrative of the ground that would shortly become the salt camp’s approach.
