The sixth of January 1806 was, by the standards of the Fort Clatsop winter, a remarkable day: the rains relented, a beached whale drew a detachment toward the coast, and Sacagawea won her place in the party going to see it. Yet the two enlisted journalists writing on this date — Sergeant Patrick Gass and Sergeant John Ordway — leave only sparse, oblique traces of these events. Read together, their entries illustrate how the expedition’s documentary record was shaped as much by a writer’s location and assignment as by the day’s actual significance.
Two Sergeants, Two Vantage Points
Gass writes from the trail, having just come down the coast to the salt-making camp. His entry frames the day in terms of weather endured and ground covered:
cleared up after two months of rain, except 4 days. We therefore set out from these lodges; passed the mouth of a considerable river; went about two miles up the shore, and found our salt makers at work.
The accounting is bookkeeperly. Gass tallies rainless days, marks a river crossed, and notes the salt makers found at their labor. He adds that two of the detachment had departed for Fort Clatsop on the 4th and that the man who had accompanied him, with two others, set out to hunt. The entry is essentially a logistics report: who is where, doing what.
Ordway, by contrast, writes from a different node of the expedition’s scattered geography. His entry is even briefer, recording the preparation of a large canoe and a small one for the whale party and noting the weather’s improvement:
one large canoe and the Small one in order to go after Some of the whail on the coast. about 9 oClock A. M. cleared off pleasant and warm.
Where Gass measures the clearing weather across two months, Ordway pinpoints the hour — about nine in the morning — when the sky turned. Both men register the same meteorological fact, but their scales differ: Gass thinks in seasons, Ordway in hours.
What the Sergeants Do Not Say
The richer narrative of January 6 — Sacagawea’s insistence on joining the whale party, Clark’s assent, the crossing of Tillamook Head, the 105-foot skeleton on the beach near Ecola Creek, the trade for some 300 pounds of blubber — does not appear in either Gass or Ordway. The curated summary, drawing on the captains’ journals, preserves Sacagawea’s now-famous protest:
She observed that She had traveled a long way with us to See the great waters, and that now that monstrous fish was also to be Seen, She thought it very hard that She Should not be permitted to See either.
Neither sergeant was in a position to record this exchange. Gass had just arrived at the salt camp, removed from the canoe-loading and the negotiations at the fort. Ordway, while at the fort, registers only the operational fact — canoes being readied — without the human drama that prompted the readying. The whale itself appears in Ordway’s entry as a noun (“whail”) and a destination, not as the spectacle the curated record describes.
This is a recurring pattern in the expedition’s enlisted journals. Gass and Ordway, writing under the captains’ supervision and often summarizing party movements rather than dialogue, produce entries that are reliable for chronology and geography but thin on speech and motive. The captains — Lewis and Clark — are typically the ones who preserve the exchanges, the debates, and the personalities. Sacagawea’s protest survives because Clark wrote it down; it is invisible in the sergeants’ record of the same day.
Register and Reliability
The differences between Gass and Ordway on January 6 are also matters of register. Gass’s prose, even allowing for the heavy editorial hand of David McKeehan in the published 1807 journal, retains the cadence of a report: “We therefore set out from these lodges; passed the mouth of a considerable river.” Ordway’s spelling — “whail,” “oClock” — preserves the rougher orthography of a field manuscript, and his syntax breaks mid-thought, suggesting an entry written in haste between tasks.
Taken together, the two entries triangulate the day without depicting it. A reader who had only Gass and Ordway would know that the weather improved, that canoes were prepared for a whale-related errand, and that the salt camp was operational. The drama on the beach at Ecola Creek, and the woman who insisted on being there, would be lost. The cross-narrator comparison thus serves as a useful caution: the expedition’s most quoted moments often survive through a single pen, and the silences in the other journals are not absences of event but absences of access.
