The journal entries for January 11, 1806, written from the soggy confines of Fort Clatsop, illuminate two themes that preoccupied the expedition during its Pacific winter: the recovery of cached elk meat and the intricate Native trade networks running along the lower Columbia. The four surviving accounts — by Captains Lewis and Clark, Sergeant Gass, and Sergeant Ordway — vary dramatically in length and ambition, providing a useful case study in how information moved among the expedition’s writers.
Parallel Captains, Diverging Sergeants
The most striking feature of the day’s record is the near-identical phrasing of the Lewis and Clark entries. Both captains open with the dispatch of a party for the elk killed on January 9, both report the negligent loss of the Indian canoe overnight, and both close with an extended commentary on Cathlamah-Clatsop-Killamuck trade. Clark writes that the canoe
is so light that 4 men Can Carry her on their Sholders a mile or more without resting, and will Carry four men and from 10 to 12 hundred pounds.
Lewis renders the same observation with only minor variation:
she is so light that four men can carry her on their sholders a mile or more without resting; and will carry three men and from 12 to 15 hundred lbs.
The discrepancy in carrying capacity — Clark’s “four men and from 10 to 12 hundred pounds” versus Lewis’s “three men and from 12 to 15 hundred lbs.” — is the kind of small divergence that recurs throughout the parallel captains’ journals and suggests one drafted from the other rather than from a common source verbatim. Which direction the copying ran on this date remains debated by scholars, but the substantive identity of the two passages is unmistakable.
By contrast, Gass and Ordway produce radically compressed accounts. Gass offers a single sentence noting only the wet weather and the elk-hauling detail. Ordway adds slightly more — mentioning that “7 men went with a canoe after the Elk meat” and that others searched for the small canoe — but neither sergeant registers the Cathlamah departure or the trade analysis that occupies half of each captain’s entry. The register difference is consistent with the broader pattern of the Fort Clatsop winter: the captains used the enforced idleness to produce ethnographic and economic commentary, while the sergeants maintained terse logistical records.
The Coastal Trade Chain
The ethnographic substance of the captains’ entries deserves particular attention. Lewis and Clark both describe a multi-stage exchange in which the Cathlamahs, departing Fort Clatsop that evening, intended to barter wappato — the starchy tuber harvested in the Columbia’s lowlands — to the Clatsops in exchange for whale blubber and oil. The Clatsops had themselves obtained the blubber from the Killamucks (Tillamooks) to the south, paying in beads. Lewis generalizes the principle:
in this manner there is a trade continually carryed on by the natives of the river each trading some article or other with their neighbours above and below them; and thus articles which are vended by the whites at the entrance of this river, find their way to the most distant nations enhabiting it’s waters.
This is one of the clearest articulations in the journals of what later anthropologists would describe as the down-the-line exchange system of the Northwest Coast. The captains recognize that European trade goods entering the Columbia at its mouth — beads in particular — are propagated upriver through successive Native intermediaries, while subsistence and luxury items (wappato, blubber, oil) move laterally along the coast. That neither sergeant records this observation underscores how much of the expedition’s ethnographic legacy depends on the captains’ willingness to expand beyond logistical reporting.
The Canoe and Its Value
The lost canoe — taken by the tide after its borrowers “had been negligent in Secureing her,” in Clark’s phrasing — drew detailed lament from both captains precisely because the small Chinookan craft was so well suited to the country. Its capacity to be shouldered overland by four men while still carrying over a thousand pounds of cargo made it functionally irreplaceable. Ordway’s brief reference to men sent to “look for the Small canoe” confirms the search, but only Lewis records the order to “resume their resurches for her early tomorrow,” reflecting the captains’ command-level perspective. The episode would shadow the expedition’s preparations for the return journey, when canoe scarcity became acute.
