March 10, 1806 was, by all three accounts, a windy day at Fort Clatsop that cleared around one in the afternoon, prompting the captains to dispatch hunters in three directions. Yet the three surviving entries for the day — by Sergeant John Ordway, Captain William Clark, and Captain Meriwether Lewis — differ so dramatically in length and ambition that they offer a textbook case of how the expedition’s record-keeping was stratified by rank and purpose.
Ordway’s Brevity, the Captains’ Parallel Texts
Ordway dispatches the entire day in a single fragment:
intermixed. Several men went out a hunting, high winds &C.
That is the whole of his contribution. The hunting parties Clark describes in detail — one above the Netul, one below, and a third ordered out at dawn to pass Meriwether’s Bay and hunt beyond the Kilhowanackkle — collapse in Ordway’s pen to “Several men went out a hunting.” The sergeant’s journal on garrison days at Fort Clatsop tends toward this ledger-style economy, recording weather and labor without elaboration.
Clark and Lewis, by contrast, produce nearly identical opening paragraphs. Clark writes that “about 1 P.M. it became fair and we Sent out two parties of hunters on this Side of the Netul, one above and the other below,” while Lewis records that “About 1 P.M. it became fair and we sent out two parties of hunters on this side of the Netul the one below and the other above.” The phrasing, the time, and the sequence of clauses match so closely that one captain is plainly transcribing or dictating from the other — a pattern well established in the Fort Clatsop journals, where Lewis’s entries are generally taken to be the source and Clark’s the copy (or vice versa, depending on the day).
The Fir Tree: A Discrepancy in the Measurements
Both captains relay a hunters’ report of an enormous conifer measured across the Netul. Here, however, their numbers diverge in a small but telling way. Clark records:
they measured a 2d tree of the fir Speces (No. i) as high as a man Could reach, was 39 feet in the girth; it tapered but very little for about 200 feet without any Considerable limbs
Lewis offers a fuller and slightly different set of figures:
they measured a pine tree, (or fir No 1) which at the hight of a man’s breast was 42 feet in the girth about three feet higher, or as high as a tall man could reach, it was 40 feet in the girth which was about the circumpherence for at least 200 feet without a limb
Lewis gives two measurements at two heights (42 feet at breast height, 40 feet at arm’s reach); Clark gives a single figure of 39 feet at the higher point. The discrepancy of one foot at the upper measurement is small, but Clark’s omission of the breast-height figure suggests he condensed Lewis’s notes rather than the reverse on this occasion. Both arrive at the same estimate — that the tree might safely be reckoned at 300 feet — and both vouch for its soundness. The species is what Lewis catalogued as “fir No. 1,” almost certainly the Sitka spruce or Douglas-fir of the coastal forest.
Duck Taxonomy: Lewis Leads, Clark Follows
The bulk of both captains’ entries is devoted to a continuing inventory of waterfowl — the brown duck, the black duck, and the divers. Once again the texts run in close parallel, with Clark’s version trailing Lewis’s by minor orthographic variations (“flated” for “flated,” “devided” for “divided,” “atached” for “attatched”). One substantive difference stands out: Lewis opens his duck catalogue with a description of the “black and white duck,” which he identifies with the Atlantic “butterbox” (the bufflehead):
the male is beautifully variagated with black and white… I take this to be the same speceis of duck common to the Atlantic coast, and frequently called the butterbox.
Clark omits this entry entirely, beginning instead with the brown duck. Whether Clark simply ran out of page or chose to skip a species he felt Lewis had already covered, the omission underscores that Lewis is the primary natural historian here and Clark the diligent copyist who occasionally abridges. The minute anatomical detail — the lobed toes “unconnected with a web,” the “conic protuberance of a cartelagenous Substance” at the base of the upper mandible — is unmistakably Lewis’s voice, preserved almost verbatim in Clark’s hand.
Taken together, the three March 10 entries show the expedition’s documentary machinery at work: Ordway logs the day, Lewis composes the science, and Clark replicates and lightly edits Lewis for the parallel record that will travel home in a separate notebook.
