February 10, 1806, at Fort Clatsop produced an unusually clear demonstration of how the expedition’s four journal-keepers divided narrative labor. All four men recorded the same external events — hunters returning empty-handed, Willard limping in from the salt works with a tomahawk gash, alarming news of sickness among the men still at the coast — but the depth and direction of their attention diverged sharply. Sergeants Gass and Ordway produced brief operational notes; Lewis and Clark, working in parallel as captains, expanded the day’s entry into a substantial botanical treatise.
The Salt Works Crisis in Four Registers
Gass offers the most compressed account, treating the day almost as a weather log punctuated by news:
ing was pleasant. In the afternoon two men came from the salt works with information that two others were sick and a third had cut his knee so badly he could scarcely walk.
Gass does not name the injured or sick. Ordway, writing at greater length, supplies one name and a hunting tally that Gass omits entirely:
in the afternoon two men came in from the Salt works and informed us that Gibson is verry sick at the Salt works and Bretn [Bratton] verry unwell, the 2 men who came had killed 5 Elk but got only a little of it at the salt works.
Ordway’s elk count (five) does not match Lewis’s (four), a small but telling discrepancy that suggests the sergeant was working from camp gossip rather than direct interview. Lewis, by contrast, names every man involved — Drewyer checking traps, Collins and Wiser returning without elk, Willard arriving with the wound, Coalter also coming in — and reconstructs Willard’s testimony in indirect speech, including Gibson’s request to be carried to the fort. Clark’s entry mirrors Lewis’s almost verbatim, down to the phrase “continue the opperation of dryin our meat,” confirming once again the captains’ practice of sharing a single textual source on which Clark imposed his idiosyncratic spelling.
Two Trees Nobody Else Sees
The most striking divergence is what Gass and Ordway leave out entirely. After dispatching the salt-works news in a single paragraph, both captains pivot to extended descriptions of two unfamiliar trees — almost certainly the bigleaf maple and vine maple of the lower Columbia. Lewis writes:
There is a tree common to the Columbia river below the entrance of cataract river which in it’s appearance when divested of it’s foliage, much resembles the white ash… the leaf is petiolate, plane, scattered, palmate lobate, divided by four deep sinuses; the lobes are repand, or terminate in from 3 to 5 accute angular points
Clark’s parallel passage is nearly identical in technical vocabulary — “palmate lobate,” “repand,” “crenate,” “petiole celindric” — but his measurements diverge in revealing ways. Where Lewis gives the first tree as “3 feet in diameter” rising “40 or 50 feet high,” Clark records “2 & 3 feet in diamieter” rising “50 or 60 feet high.” For the second tree, Lewis says “15 to 20 feet high”; Clark says “20 to 30.” These are not transcription errors but independent estimates, suggesting that even when the captains shared a botanical template, each adjusted figures from memory or his own observation.
Patterns of Authority and Attention
The day exemplifies a hierarchy of narrative ambition that recurs throughout the Fort Clatsop winter. Gass writes for an imagined publisher’s audience — pleasant weather, headcount of casualties, no names. Ordway, more invested in camp life, names men and counts game. Lewis writes simultaneously as commander, ethnographer, and naturalist, treating Willard’s wound and a maple leaf as equally worthy of precise documentation. Clark, copying Lewis but never mechanically, preserves the scientific register while quietly recalibrating the numbers.
That four men at the same fort on the same evening could produce such differently weighted entries is itself a finding. The salt-works emergency was real and would within days require a rescue party for Gibson; the maples were a scientific curiosity. Only the captains, with their Jeffersonian charge to catalogue the country’s productions, treated both as equally pressing news.
