The journal entries for March 16, 1806 offer an unusually clear window into the divided labor of the expedition’s record-keeping. Four men — Lewis, Clark, Gass, and Ordway — wrote from the same wet quarters at Fort Clatsop, and each produced a document shaped by rank, literacy, and assigned task. Read together, the entries reveal both the captains’ intensifying anxiety about supplies for the homeward journey and the natural-history project Lewis was driving toward completion before the expedition broke camp.
Parallel Captains, Diverging Sergeants
Clark and Lewis open with nearly identical sentences — “Not any occurrence worthy of relation took place today” — and then track one another phrase by phrase through an inventory of the expedition’s remaining trade stock. The overlap is so close that one entry plainly derives from the other. A telling discrepancy appears in the opening of that inventory: Clark writes that
One handkerchief would contain all the Small articles of merchandize which we possess
while Lewis writes that
two handkercheifs would now contain all the small articles of merchandize which we possess
. Whether the difference is a copying slip or a quiet correction, both captains arrive at the same grim summary of what remains: six blue robes, one scarlet, an artillerist’s coat and hat, five robes cut from the expedition’s large flag, and “a few old cloaths trimed with ribbon.” Clark calls it
a scant dependence indeed, for the tour of the distance of that before us
— a phrase Lewis renders almost word for word.
The sergeants offer no such anxiety. Ordway’s entry is characteristically compressed:
Stayed in the fort, rained the greater part of the day. nothing else extroardinary.
He notes only that the officers “Sealed up some papers and letters for Mr Haily” — a reference to the Boston trader Captain Hill — and gave them to visiting Indians for possible delivery, a logistical detail the captains omit entirely from their March 16 entries. Gass, meanwhile, conflates two days, looking back to vultures killed on the 15th (“the largest fowls I had ever seen”) and forward to the 17th, when he reports that the party finally
got a canoe from the natives, for which we gave an officer’s uniform coat
. Gass thus quietly resolves the bargaining impasse the captains record on the 16th — the Indians “would not dispose of their canoe at a price which it was in our power to give” — by noting the price the captains were ultimately forced to pay.
Lewis’s Coastal Natural History
Where the captains diverge most dramatically is in their natural-history passages. Both describe the white salmon trout brought in by an Indian fisherman, agreeing on its length (2 feet 8 inches), weight (10 pounds), and ray counts, with only minor variation — Clark gives the gill fin twelve rays, Lewis thirteen. Both reference an accompanying drawing.
Beyond the fish, however, each captain pursues a separate catalogue. Clark turns to the beach, describing
The pellucid jelly like Substance, called the Sea nettle
washed up along the strand, and then two species of fucus or seaweed, one bearing a hollow vesicle “which would contain from one to 2 gallons.” Lewis instead works through the shellfish: clams “of an oval form… and sky blue colour,” periwinkles, river mussels, cockles, and a circular limpet-like animal whose shell is
thin and entire on the margin, convex and smooth on the upper side… covered with a number minute capillary fibers by means of which it attatches itself to the sides of the rocks
. The division of subject matter suggests deliberate coordination: the captains were not duplicating natural-history work but parceling it out, with Clark documenting drift specimens and Lewis the attached intertidal fauna.
Register and What Each Narrator Sees
The day’s four entries demonstrate the stratified observation that makes the expedition’s record so rich. Ordway notices the diplomatic mail. Gass, writing retrospectively, captures the vultures — almost certainly California condors — that the captains do not mention on this date, and pins down the canoe transaction the captains leave unresolved. Clark and Lewis share the worry over trade goods and the work of zoological description, but split the coastline between them. Only by reading the four together does March 16 emerge as something more than the unremarkable Sunday the captains claim it was.
