The journals of February 16, 1806 offer an unusually clean specimen of the collaborative writing practices that governed Fort Clatsop’s winter quarters. Three narrators were present—Meriwether Lewis, William Clark, and John Ordway—and their entries, placed side by side, illustrate the hierarchy of attention and labor among them. Ordway, occupied with the routines of an enlisted sergeant, condenses the day to a single observation:
three men went out to hunt.
Lewis and Clark, by contrast, produce paragraphs that mirror one another almost word for word, before each diverging into the natural-history material that most interested him.
Shared Text, Shared Patients
The opening sections of the captains’ entries are clearly the product of one writing from the other—a common practice during the Fort Clatsop winter. Both report dispatching Shannon, Labiche, and Frazier up the Kilhawanakkle River; both note the absence of news from Sergeant Gass; both describe the medical condition of Bratton and Gibson in nearly identical phrasing. Clark writes that Bratton
is verry weak and complains of a pain in the lower part of the back when he moves which I suppose proceeds from debility.
Lewis’s version reads:
Bratton is still very weak and complains of a pain in the lower part of the back when he moves which I suppose procedes from dability.
The substantive medical content is identical—doses of bark, niter, and Dr. Rush’s pills—suggesting that one captain copied from the other’s draft, with Clark’s characteristically looser orthography (“verry,” “efficasious,” “opperated”) preserved against Lewis’s slightly tighter spelling.
One small but telling divergence: Clark records that he administered “barks and Salt peter” to Bratton, while Lewis writes only that “I gave him barks.” The first-person pronoun in each version reveals that both men felt entitled to claim the medical care as their own, a reminder that the journals were not merely records but performances of co-command.
Where the Entries Diverge: Bird and Bear
After the shared paragraphs on the men and the Indian dogs—again, near-verbatim across both captains—the entries split. Clark devotes the remainder of his page to the wounded California condor that Shannon and Labiche brought into camp alive. His description is among the most detailed natural-history records in the journals, with measurements down to fractions of an inch:
between the extremities of the wings it measured 9 feet 2 Inches; from the extremity of the beak to that of the toe 3 feet 9 inches and a half.
He notes the iris “of a pale scarlet red,” the pupil “of a deep Sea green or black,” the twelve tail feathers each fourteen inches long, and refers the reader to a sketch on the facing leaf. The bird, he asserts, may be “the largest Bird of North America.”
Lewis, on the same day, says nothing of the condor at all. Instead, he opens with a technical note on the calibration of his octant—“I found that it was 2° 1′ 45″ + or additive beyond the fracture”—and closes with a comparative essay on the ranges of the grizzly and black bear across the continent. The contrast is striking. Clark, faced with a remarkable specimen physically present in camp, produces a meticulous anatomical inventory. Lewis, working from memory and accumulated field experience, produces a synthetic biogeographic overview, observing that the grizzly is
by no means as plenty on this side of the rocky mountains as on the other, nor do I beleive that they are found atall in the woody country, which borders this coast.
Register and Division of Labor
The day’s entries thus document a recurring pattern at Fort Clatsop. Routine reports—weather, hunting parties, medical care—were drafted once and copied between the captains, often with Lewis’s text serving as the source and Clark adapting it (or, on some days, the reverse). When the captains turned to natural history, however, each pursued his own interests: Clark the careful measurer of specimens in hand, Lewis the synthesizer of regional patterns and the keeper of instrumental observations. Ordway’s single line is not laziness but role: the sergeant’s journal tracked duties and movements, leaving the encyclopedic work to the officers. The condor that Clark weighed and measured would, through his pen, become one of the expedition’s signal contributions to American ornithology—while Lewis, on the very same day, was looking inland toward the bears of the plains he had left behind.
