February 25, 1806, brought no travel and little incident at Fort Clatsop. A coastal storm kept the party confined, and the four narrators present register the day in strikingly different proportions. Patrick Gass and John Ordway each compress the day into a single sentence, while William Clark and Meriwether Lewis fill pages with parallel but divergent natural-history observations. The contrast offers a clear view of how the expedition’s record was layered—enlisted men noting weather and visitors, captains expanding the same raw material into scientific description.
Four Registers of the Same Day
Gass opens tersely:
stormy. About 10 o’clock the natives went away, though it continued to rain very fast. They brought us yesterday a number of small fish, of a very excellent kind, resembling a herring, and about half the size.
Ordway is briefer still, recording only that he
feel a little better, the Storm contnd thro the course of the day.
Both men note the storm; only Gass mentions the fish that will dominate Clark’s page. Ordway, recovering from illness, attends to his own body.
Clark and Lewis open with nearly identical sentences—a familiar pattern at Fort Clatsop, where the captains shared field notes and copied freely from one another. Clark writes that
It continued to rain and blow So violently that there was no movement of the party to day. the Indians left us in the morning on their return to their village. Willard Somewhat worse the others are on the recovery.
Lewis’s version is the same passage with minor orthographic variants (“mortifyed” for “mortified,” “Invalledes” for “others”). The shared frustration over lost celestial observations is also nearly verbatim. From that common opening, however, the two captains diverge sharply in subject matter.
Clark’s Eulachon and Lewis’s Mammals
Clark devotes the bulk of his entry to a small fish purchased from the Clatsops that morning—what later naturalists would identify as the eulachon or candlefish (Thaleichthys pacificus). His description is methodical and quantitative, counting fin rays (“the fins next to the gills have eleven rays each. those of the abdomen have Eight each, those of the pinna ani are 20 and 2 half formed in front”), noting coloration, dentition, and the position of the jaws. He situates the species taxonomically, placing it tentatively within the
Malacapterygious Order and Class Clupea
while flagging the features—the smooth abdomen, the protruding lower jaw—that distinguish it from herring, shad, and anchovy. He concludes with a culinary verdict that has become one of the most quoted passages from the winter at Fort Clatsop:
I found them best when cooked in Indian Stile, which is by rosting a number of them together on a wooden spit without any previous preperation whatever. they are so fat that they require no aditional sauce, and I think them Superior to any fish I ever tasted, even more dilicate and lussious than the white fish of the Lakes which have heretofore formed my Standard of excellence among the fishes.
Clark also promises a drawing on the facing page—the famous eulachon sketch that survives in his journal as one of the expedition’s most accomplished natural-history illustrations.
Lewis, meanwhile, abandons the fish entirely and turns to terrestrial mammals. He describes the raccoons of the coastal forest, the large grey squirrel of the oak country above the Columbia falls, and a small brown squirrel of the piny lowlands. His method mirrors Clark’s: precise measurements relative to known eastern species (“as large as the fox squirrel of the Southern Atlantic states”), color zoning of back versus belly, ecological notes on diet and habitat, and observations on Native use—the grey squirrel skins, he records, are valued for robes while raccoon pelts are not.
Division of Labor in the Cabinet
The day illustrates how the captains used storm-bound confinement productively. Rather than duplicating each other’s natural-history work, Clark took up the fish brought in by the visiting Clatsops while Lewis worked through specimens already in their notes from the surrounding country. Gass and Ordway, lacking the captains’ scientific brief, recorded only the social and meteorological frame: the visitors departed, the storm continued, the sick mended or worsened. Read together, the four entries show the expedition’s documentary apparatus operating at full capacity even on a day when, as Clark put it,
there was no movement of the party.
