The journal entries attributed to Patrick Gass and William Clark for December 21, 1805 sit oddly beside one another. Clark, writing from the half-built quarters that would soon be named Fort Clatsop, describes a wet, stationary day of construction labor near the Pacific. Gass, by contrast, describes a day of travel — passing Indian lodges, trading for bread made from a small white root, and pushing through rocky rapids on a river. The two narrators appear to be in entirely different places.
Clark at the Cabins
Clark’s entry is brief and operational. The captains and their men are settling in for the winter, and the prose is dominated by weather and labor:
December 21st Saturday 1805 rain as usial last night and all day to day moderately. we Continued at the Cabins dobbing & Shinking of them, fall Several trees which would not Split into punchins
Two narrative details stand out. First, an incident of theft: Clark notes that the Indians were detected in Stealing a Spoon & a Bone, and left us
. A parallel passage in the same entry refines the object as a horn Spoon
. Second, Clark records the dispatch of two men to the open lands near the Ocian for Sackacome,
the bearberry leaf (sacacommis) the party mixed with tobacco. The aside that it has an agreeable flavour
is one of the small ethnobotanical notations that punctuate Clark’s winter entries.
Gass on the Move
Gass, meanwhile, narrates a march of thirty-two miles past multiple Indian villages:
At 10, we came to the lodges of some of the natives, and halted with them about 2 hours. Here we got some bread, made of a small white root, which grows in this part of the country.
He goes on to describe trade goods that interest him as a frontiersman reading the landscape — some small robes made of the skins of grey squirrels, some racoon skins, and acorns, which are signs of a timbered coun-try not far distant
. The reasoning is characteristic of Gass: material culture is read as ecological evidence. Acorns mean oaks, oaks mean timber, timber means a country worth describing. The day closes with the party encamping at Indian lodges where we pro-cured wood from the natives to cook with
.
The geography Gass describes — rocky rapids, riverside villages, trade in roots and small-mammal robes — fits the Columbia descent of late October 1805, not the rainy coastal encampment of late December. The published Gass journal, edited by David McKeehan in 1807, is known to contain dating irregularities, and the entry assigned here to December 21 reads like material from earlier in the autumn that has been displaced in editing or transcription.
Register and Reliability
Even setting aside the apparent date mismatch, the two entries display the stylistic contrast that recurs throughout the expedition record. Clark writes in compressed field shorthand, his orthography idiosyncratic (dobbing & Shinking
, punchins
, Sackey Commy
) and his observations bound to the immediate camp. Gass — or McKeehan polishing Gass — writes in cleaner, more discursive sentences aimed at a reading public, with explanatory glosses (a small white root, which grows in this part of the country
) that Clark would never bother to supply for himself.
The theft incident in Clark’s entry is also notable for what it does not become. Clark records the detection and departure of the offending visitor without elaboration or moralizing. Gass, when he reports such episodes elsewhere in the journal, tends to frame them with greater narrative shape. Here, since his entry is occupied with travel, the Fort Clatsop spoon disappears entirely from the public record except through Clark’s terse note.
For researchers using these entries together, the December 21 pairing is a useful caution: synchronizing narrators by date alone can produce false simultaneity. The Clark manuscript anchors the day at the coastal cabins; the Gass passage, whatever its true date, belongs to a different stretch of the journey altogether.
