The entries for March 2, 1806 offer an unusually clear specimen of how the four principal Fort Clatsop journalists divided narrative labor. Sergeant Patrick Gass and Sergeant John Ordway register the bare event — a hunting and trading party returning at evening with small herring-like fish, sturgeon, and a few wappato roots. The captains, by contrast, treat the same arrival as the occasion for a much longer scientific and dietary commentary, with Lewis and Clark producing entries that are nearly verbatim copies of one another.
The Sergeants’ Brevity and the Captains’ Expansion
Gass closes his short paragraph with an ethnographic detail neither captain bothers to include — the Clatsop names of the two nearby waterways:
The Indian name for the river we were up yesterday is Kil-hou-a-nak-kle, and that of the small river, which passes the fort Ne-tul.
Ordway, writing in the same register, adds a comparative note on the small fish, calling them resembling herren only a size smaller
, and remarks on the abundance of the native fishery. Both sergeants treat the day as logistical: who went out, what came back, what was bought.
Clark and Lewis open with an identical sentence about the men’s slow recovery:
The diet of the Sick is So inferior that they recover their Strength but Slowly. none of them are now Sick but all in a State of Covelessence with keen appetites and nothing to eate except lean Elk meat.
This shared opening, repeated almost word for word in Lewis’s entry, is one of many indicators that the captains were either dictating to each other, copying from a common draft, or — as scholars have long argued for the Fort Clatsop winter — Clark was systematically transcribing Lewis’s natural-history observations into his own journal. The arrival of Drouillard, Cruzatte, and Wiser with fat Sturgen, fresh anchoves and a bag Containing about a bushel of Wappato
reads, in both captains’ books, as relief: we feasted on the Anchovies and wappatoe.
Two Versions of the Cock of the Plains
The bulk of both captains’ entries is given over to a description of the sage grouse, which Lewis calls the Cock of the Plains. Comparison of the two passages reveals small but telling differences. Clark estimates the bird at 3/4ths the Size of a turkey
; Lewis gives 2/3rds the size of a turkey.
Clark places the bird’s range from the enterance of Lewis’s river to the mountains which pass the Columbia between the Great falls and Rapids
; Lewis writes instead from the entrance of the S. E. fork of the Columbia to that of Clark’s river.
The discrepancies suggest Clark was working from an earlier or differently worded draft of Lewis’s, then adjusting geographic terminology to his own preference.
Lewis’s version is also more complete. Where Clark’s manuscript trails off mid-sentence — it resembles a maw quite
— Lewis carries the description through several additional observations: that the birds sometimes feed on the prickley pear
, that they make a cackling noise something like the dunghill fowl
, and a candid culinary verdict: the flesh of the cock of the Plains is dark, and only tolerable in point of flavor. I do not think it as good as either the Pheasant or Grouse.
Lewis even promises a sketch of the head and beak. These are the marks of the originating natural-history observer; Clark’s version, however careful, breaks off where his patience or his light apparently failed.
What Each Narrator Notices
Only Clark records the ethnobotanical paragraph on the cattail root, which he describes as Composed of a number of capellary white flexable Strong fibers among which is a mealy or Starch like Substance which readily disolves in the mouth.
He even speculates on its commercial use: it appears to me that this Substance would make excellent Starch.
Lewis omits the cattail entirely on this date. Conversely, Lewis’s grouse description is fuller. The pattern of the day, then, is not simple copying in one direction but a layered, overlapping authorship in which each captain contributes some passages and shares others, while the sergeants below them keep the practical ledger of fish, sturgeon, and wappato that fed the convalescent camp.
