The journals for December 15, 1805 capture the Corps of Discovery split between two complementary tasks at the embryonic Fort Clatsop: hauling elk meat from the forest and finishing the cabins that would shelter the party through the coming winter. Because Patrick Gass and William Clark were physically separated that Sunday, their entries do not duplicate one another but rather interlock, each filling in what the other could not see.
The Camp Carpenter and the Pack Train
Gass, who remained at the construction site, records the day in the brisk, foreman’s idiom that characterizes much of his journal. He notes that Clark
with 16 of the party started to bring in the meat the four men were taking care of; myself and 2 others were employed in fixing and finishing the quarters of the Commanding Officers, and 2 more preparing puncheons for covering the huts.
The accounting is precise: sixteen out, three on the captains’ quarters, two splitting puncheons. Gass — himself a carpenter by trade and the party’s principal builder — naturally tallies his world in assignments and materials. He closes with the small social note that
at night 3 Indians came to our camp, and brought us two large salmon.
That visit is invisible in Clark’s entry because Clark was miles upriver, sleeping rough.
Clark, for his part, writes from inside the labor he is describing. He set out with sixteen men in three canoes, proceeded up the right-hand fork to the head of tidewater, and then — in a detail Gass could not have known — joined the packing himself:
from 4 mile to 3 miles distance all hands pack not one man exempted from this labour I also pack my Self Some of this meat, and Cook for those out in packing
The image of a captain shouldering elk quarters and tending a fire for returning packers is one of the more vivid democratic moments in the western journals, and it survives only because Clark recorded it himself.
Two Drafts, One Day
The second Clark-attributed entry — the longer Sunday narrative beginning “I Set out early with 16 men and 3 Canoes” — is clearly a fuller redaction of the same events, likely a fair-copy expansion. It supplies geography Gass omits (“up the River three miles and thence up a large Creek from the right about 3 miles”), procedure (“all hands went out in three different parties and brought in to the Canoe each Man a quarter of Elk”), and, crucially, the names of those who failed to return:
about half the men missed their way and did not get to the Canoes untill after Dark, and Serjt. Ordway Colter, Colins Whitehouse & McNeal Staid out all night without fire and in the rainCloudy all day Some rain in the evening.
The shorter Clark field entry mentions only that “5 did not join to night”; the expanded version supplies the roster — Ordway, Colter, Collins, Whitehouse, and McNeal — a list of considerable interest given that Sergeant John Ordway is himself one of the expedition’s principal diarists. Ordway’s own journal for this date, when consulted, can thus be cross-checked against Clark’s account of his fireless night in the rain.
Register and Omission
The contrast in register between the two narrators is instructive. Gass writes in the past tense of an observer who saw the canoes leave and the Indians arrive; his weather note (“Some light showers fell during the day”) is brief and external. Clark, soaked and packing, registers the same weather more emphatically — “Some rain in the evening Cloudy all day” — and repeats the phrase almost verbatim in his expanded draft, suggesting that the weather mattered more to the man under it than to the man under a half-finished roof.
Neither narrator mentions the other’s activity. Gass does not record the lost men; Clark does not record the salmon delivered by the three Indian visitors. Read together, however, the entries reconstruct a single Sunday at the mouth of the Columbia: hammers on puncheons at the fort, elk quarters on shoulders in the woods, and five men shivering somewhere in between.
This analysis was prepared with AI assistance and reviewed by a human editor.
