February 5th, 1806 at Fort Clatsop produced one of the winter’s clearest demonstrations of how the expedition’s narrators divided the labor of observation. The day’s events were modest: a hunter’s signal shot across the Netul, a party dispatched through tidal creeks, the recovery of a long-missing Indian canoe, and word of six elk killed upriver. Yet the four surviving accounts — by Patrick Gass, John Ordway, William Clark, and Meriwether Lewis — range from a single sentence of weather-bitten practicality to several hundred words of close botanical description.
Four Scales of the Same Day
Sergeant Gass, who actually led the party across the river, leaves the briefest record. His entry says nothing of the recovered canoe and nothing of Reubin Field’s phesant; instead it captures the bodily reality of the errand:
started with a canoe to bring in the meat of the elk, killed yesterday; and had to encamp out all night but with the assistance of the elk skins and our blankets, we lodged pretty comfortable, though the snow was 4 or 5 inches deep.
Ordway, writing from inside the fort, supplies the news as it arrived rather than as it unfolded. He compresses the day into two facts — the hunter’s report of six elk and the party’s discovery of the small canoe — and notably calls the recovered craft a Sciff or small canoe which was drove up on a marsh up a creek. His version is the rumor-mill summary: accurate, terse, and shaped by hearsay rather than first-hand experience.
Clark and Lewis, by contrast, produce nearly identical full narratives. Both open with the line that Late this evening one of the hunters fired off his gun over the marsh of the Netul opposit to the fort & hooped (Clark) or over the swamp of the Netul opposite to the fort and hooped (Lewis). The phrasing, sentence order, and even the parenthetical aside about the tide are essentially the same. This is one of many days in the Fort Clatsop winter when the captains’ journals run in parallel — Clark almost certainly copying from Lewis or both working from a shared draft — with only minor lexical substitutions (Clark’s marsh for Lewis’s swamp; Field for Fields; Labiesh for Labuishe).
Where the Captains Diverge: The Pheasant and the Fir
The shared text breaks apart at the pheasant Reubin Field brought back. Clark dismisses it in a single clause — a Pheasant which differs but little from those Common to the United States — and immediately pivots to the fir tree description. Lewis, the natural historian, lingers:
it’s brown is reather brighter and more of a redish tint. it has eighteen feathers in the tale of about six inches in length. this bird is also booted as low as the toes. the two tufts of long black feathers on each side of the neck most conspicuous in the male of those of the Atlantic states is also observable in every particular with this.
This is a recurring pattern across the winter: when a specimen warrants close anatomical attention, Lewis writes the description and Clark abridges. Clark’s habit of compressing zoological detail while faithfully copying the day’s narrative frame suggests his journal here functions as a record of events with Lewis’s natural history grafted on, rather than as an independent observation.
Both captains then turn to Fir No. 2, the second species in Lewis’s ongoing numbered survey of Pacific Northwest conifers. The description — a tree 160 to 180 feet tall, four to six feet in diameter, with thin dark bark, soft white wood difficult to rive, acerose two-ranked leaves flat with a small longitudinal channel in the upper disk, and a remarkably small ovate cone not larger than the end of a man’s thumb — corresponds to Sitka spruce (Picea sitchensis), the dominant timber of the lower Columbia. Clark’s version follows Lewis nearly word for word, with the customary spelling drift (Streight, termonate, dificuelt).
Reading the Day Through Four Pens
What emerges from the four entries is not contradiction but stratification. Gass records the body’s experience of the work; Ordway records the news that reached the fort; Clark records the official narrative; Lewis records the science. The recovered Indian canoe — described by Clark and Lewis as so long lost and much lamented — is invisible to Gass (who recovered it) and reduced to a marsh-stranded skiff by Ordway. The phesant is a passing note for Clark and a measured specimen for Lewis. Only by reading the entries against one another does the full texture of February 5th come into view.
