The journal entries for December 9, 1805 present an instructive contrast in scale and subject. Patrick Gass, writing from the encampment, compresses the day into a brief paragraph of logistical bookkeeping. William Clark, separated from the main party and pushing toward the Pacific, produces one of the longest and most ethnographically detailed entries of the entire winter on the coast. Both men open with the same fact — relentless rain — but they part company immediately after.
Gass at Camp: The Logistics of Settling In
Gass’s entry is characteristically efficient. He notes that a sergeant and eight men were dispatched to retrieve meat cached the previous day, while others were assigned to camp improvements and to clearing ground for the huts and small fort that would become Fort Clatsop. He closes with a single sentence on weather and visitors:
In the evening some of the natives came to our camp, the first we have seen for some days. It continued cloudy and wet all day.
This is the voice of a sergeant-carpenter accustomed to summarizing for a general audience. Gass habitually records labor assignments, weather, and the rough count of contacts; he does not pursue individuals or describe interiors. His remark that these were the first natives seen “for some days” is itself a useful corrective — it situates Clark’s lavish reception against a backdrop of relative isolation at the work site.
Clark on the Coast: An Ethnographic Set Piece
Clark, meanwhile, has separated from the building party with five men, sending two after elk and taking three with him toward the ocean. His entry reads like a small travel narrative. After being turned back repeatedly by flooded sloughs — “I crossed 3 Slashes by wadeing to my knees & was prevented proceeding by the 4th which was a pond of 200 yds. we.” — he meets three Clatsop men who invite him to their village of four lodges on a tidewater stream seventy yards wide. What follows is among the most concrete descriptions of Clatsop domestic hospitality in the journals:
I was invited to a lodge by a young Chief was treated great Politeness, we had new mats to Set on, and himself and wife produced for us to eate, fish, Lickorish, & black roots, on neet Small mats, and Cramberries & Sackacomey berris, in bowls made of horn, Supe made of a kind of bread made of berries common to this Countrey which they gave me in a neet wooden trencher, with a Cockle Shell to eate it with
The repeated word “neet” — applied to mats, trenchers, and the overall setting — registers Clark’s genuine admiration. He is paying attention to material culture: horn bowls, wooden trenchers, cockle-shell utensils, the differentiation of foods on separate small mats. None of this appears in Gass.
Clark also produces an early American description of two Chinookan games, one a hand-game played with a bean passed between palms and wagered against strings of white beads, the other a rolling game with wooden pieces that he gropes to describe by analogy:
they other game is with round Pieces of wood much the Shape of the ____ Backgammon which they role thro between 2 pins.
The blank space in the manuscript — Clark hunting for a word and leaving room to fill it later — is a small but telling artifact of field composition.
Register, Audience, and What Each Narrator Sees
The two entries illustrate the structural division of labor that runs through the expedition’s documentary record. Gass writes for the general reader and for the project of the expedition as a whole: who worked, what was built, what the weather did. His prose is grammatically tidy and externally focused. Clark, when traveling apart from the main body, writes with greater latitude and far greater specificity, recording personal experience (“the flees were So troublesom that I Slept but little”), Indigenous foodways, and the social texture of a single evening in a single lodge.
Neither narrator is copying the other on this date — Clark was simply not present at the camp Gass describes, and Gass had no access to the Clatsop village. The result is unusually clean evidence of how each man allocated attention when left to his own devices: Gass to the collective task of shelter, Clark to the encounter, the meal, and the games. Read together, the two entries frame the expedition’s first sustained week on the lower Columbia from both inside and outside the half-built walls of what would become Fort Clatsop.
