The journal entries for March 14, 1806, offer a useful case study in how four men sharing the same fort, the same meals, and the same weather could produce four distinctly different documentary records. Patrick Gass, John Ordway, Meriwether Lewis, and William Clark all describe the recovery of two elk killed by Collins the previous evening and the late arrival of George Drouillard with a party of Clatsops bearing an "indifferent" canoe for sale. Beyond that shared core, however, the entries diverge in length, register, and subject matter in ways that illuminate each narrator’s habits.
The Canoe Trade and a Refused Coat
The day’s central diplomatic event was a failed transaction. Lewis records it briefly and from his own perspective:
the hats and roots we purchased, but could not obtain the canoe without giving more than our stock of merchandize would lisence us. I offered him my laced uniform coat but he would not exchange.
Clark’s parallel entry — the two captains routinely shared and copied source material — adds an interpretive layer Lewis omits:
Capt Lewis offered his laced uniform Coat for a verry indiferent Canoe, agreeable to their usial way of tradeing his price was double.
The phrase "agreeable to their usial way of tradeing his price was double" is Clark’s own gloss, characterizing Clatsop bargaining practice in a way Lewis does not. This is a recurring pattern in the captains’ parallel journals: although the entries are clearly drawn from a common conversation or shared draft, Clark frequently adds ethnographic generalizations or commercial intelligence that Lewis leaves out. Ordway, by contrast, simply notes that Drouillard "returnd and a number of the Clatsop Indians came with him brought a canoe to trade to us, & some Hats &C." — the bare commercial fact, with no mention of Lewis’s coat at all. Gass omits the canoe episode entirely.
Clark alone preserves a striking piece of secondhand maritime intelligence: the Clatsops report that an Indian from the "Quin-na-chart Nation" six days’ march to the northwest has lately seen four vessels trading there, with named captains — "Mr. Haley, Moore, Callamon & Swipeton" — exchanging European goods for whalebone, oil, and skins. None of the other three journalists records this conversation, a reminder that Clark frequently functioned as the expedition’s collector of geographic and commercial hearsay from visiting Native parties.
Hunting, Weather, and the Enlisted Men’s Eye
The enlisted journalists Gass and Ordway keep their accounts short and practical. Both note the recovery of the two elk; Ordway specifies that "7 of the party went" and that they were "doe Elk," a detail neither captain records. Gass volunteers that he himself was in the recovery party — a first-person grounding the captains rarely provide for their men.
Gass also captures observations the captains miss entirely. He reports that two unsuccessful hunters returned having "killed nothing but a goose and a raven which they eat last night" — a small but telling note on the diet at Fort Clatsop in the lean late winter. He alone records seasonal natural-history details:
While out to-day I saw a number of musquitoes flying about. I also saw a great quantity of sheep-sorrel growing in the woods of a very large size.
The mosquitoes mark a phenological turn toward spring; the sheep-sorrel is the kind of botanical aside one might expect from Lewis. On this date, however, Lewis is preoccupied with fish.
Lewis’s Salmon-Trout Treatise
By far the longest portion of Lewis’s entry has nothing to do with the day’s events. He devotes most of the page to a careful comparative description of the "Salmon Trout" — two color forms he has observed, one silvery white encountered at the great falls, the other dark-backed with yellow sides and "transverse stripes of dark brown" found in the Fort Clatsop neighborhood. He details the dentition ("a single series of small subulate streight teeth"), fin placement, seasonality relative to the red charr and common salmon, and the upstream limits of the species. He closes with a note on the "mountain or speckled trout" of the Kooskooske and an anxious aside about the coming salmon run:
it will be unfortunate for us if they do not, for they must form our principal dependence for food in ascending the Columbia.
This passage exemplifies Lewis’s characteristic method: a day’s small domestic events are dispatched in a paragraph, after which the journal becomes a natural-history notebook. Clark, working from what appears to be the same draft of the day’s narrative portion, simply omits the fish description altogether. The division of labor — Lewis the naturalist, Clark the cartographer and intelligence officer, Gass and Ordway the chroniclers of the camp’s daily texture — is rarely as cleanly visible as it is on March 14, 1806.
