The entries of January 14, 1806 from Fort Clatsop offer a textbook case of how the expedition’s three concurrent journalists could approach the same day with radically different lenses. Meriwether Lewis and William Clark produce near-parallel passages totaling roughly five hundred words apiece on canoe security and Columbia River fish economics, while Patrick Gass dispenses with the date in a single clause and folds January 14 into a three-day summary of skin-dressing and salt-making.
The Runaway Pirogue
Both captains open with the same incident, and the textual relationship between their entries is unmistakable. Clark writes:
This morning the Serjt. of the guard reported the absence of one of our Canoes it had broken the Cord by which it was attached and the tide had taken her off; we Sent a party imediately in Serch of her, they returned in about 3 hours haveing fortunately found her.
Lewis’s version is virtually identical in structure and phrasing, differing chiefly in vocabulary — “perogue” for Clark’s “Canoe,” “chord” for “Cord,” “attatched” for “attached”:
This morning the Sergt. of the Guard reported the absence of one of the large perogues, it had broken the chord by which it was attatched and the tide had taken it off…
The shared sentence architecture — and the near-identical concluding worry that losing the craft would have forced the construction of “three small ones, which with the few tools we have now left would be a serious undertaking” — confirms what scholars have long observed about the Fort Clatsop winter: Lewis and Clark were demonstrably copying from a common draft or from one another. Whose hand came first on this date remains debated, but the lexical refinements in Lewis’s version (“mored in the small branch just above the landing”) suggest he polished what Clark had set down more plainly.
Gass, by contrast, does not mention the pirogue at all. His abbreviated narrative reaches January 14 only to note that men “were sent to the salt works to assist in making salt” and that the rest were “dressing elk skins for mockasins, which is a laborious business, but we have no alternative in this part of the country.” The sergeant’s editorial register is utilitarian — focused on the labor of the enlisted men — and indifferent to command-level concerns about boat security.
Pounded Salmon and the Mystery Traders
The bulk of both captains’ entries turns to commercial ethnography: an attempt to reason out where the 30,000 pounds of annually pounded Columbia salmon ultimately go. Here the parallel texts diverge interestingly. Clark frames the question and concludes that the fish must be “exclusively Sold to, and Consumed by the nativs of the Sea coast,” reasoning that “I cannot imagine what the white merchents objet Could be in purchaseing fish, or where they Could dispose of it.” Lewis poses the same question but reaches the opposite tentative conclusion — that the fish is indeed an article of trade with whites — adding the empirical observation that “I have never seen any of this pounded fish in their lodges,” which would not be the case if local consumption explained the volume.
This is one of the rare moments where the captains’ shared draft splits into genuinely independent analytical conclusions on the same evidence. Both agree that the Skillutes function as “intermediate merchants and Carryers” (Clark) or “intermediate merchants and carryers” (Lewis) — the phrase is identical — but the captains have honestly registered their disagreement about the salmon’s terminus.
Clark alone preserves a striking ethnolinguistic detail that Lewis omits: the coastal Indians “gave us proofs of their varacity by repeating maney words of English, Sun of a pitch &c.” The expletive overheard from passing maritime traders is the kind of vivid evidence Clark’s journal often retains where Lewis’s polishes it away. Clark also speculates more openly about the traders’ origins, considering Nootka Sound and noting that informants point southwest when asked which direction the ships depart.
Three Registers of the Same Day
The day thus offers a compact illustration of the journals’ stratification. Gass writes for the practical reader: who worked, what was made, what the weather did. Lewis and Clark, working from a shared template, produce the expedition’s quasi-official record — but Clark retains the salty anecdotal detail and the more cautious commercial conclusion, while Lewis advances the bolder hypothesis grounded in observational absence. Read alone, any one of these entries would mislead; read together, January 14 reveals a fort simultaneously preoccupied with mundane labor, with the security of irreplaceable boats, and with a Pacific trade network whose contours the captains were straining, with limited success, to map.
