The sixth of March 1806 finds the Corps of Discovery in a state of careful preparation at Fort Clatsop. Provisions are exhausted, hunters are dispatched in every direction, and a small canoe party under Sergeant Pryor sets off upriver for fish and wapato. All four journal-keepers register these movements, but the texture and ambition of their entries diverge dramatically — offering a clear case study in how the expedition’s narrators distributed labor between the practical and the scientific.
Logistical Brevity: Gass and Ordway
Patrick Gass and John Ordway, the expedition’s enlisted journalists, treat the day as a matter of operations. Gass notes that with provisions “hausted,” six men were sent out hunting and three more after fish, with others “employed in repairing the canoes that we may be able to set out on our return immediately, should our hunters be unsuccessful.” His observation that “the elk, almost the only game in this part of the country, are chiefly gone to the mountains” succinctly explains the strategic anxiety underlying the day’s dispersals.
Ordway is even more compressed, identifying the fishing party’s specific destination — “the Cathlemaks village after fish and wa-pa-toes” — a detail neither captain records. He also mentions a visit from “our old Clatsop Chief,” though without naming him. Ordway’s habit of supplying place-names and tribal labels where the captains generalize is consistent across the Fort Clatsop winter.
Parallel Captains: Clark Copies Lewis, with Variations
The entries by William Clark and Meriwether Lewis run in close parallel, confirming the well-documented pattern by which Clark transcribed and lightly modified Lewis’s daily narrative during the Fort Clatsop period. Both open with nearly identical phrasing about the fishing and hunting parties setting out, and both record Comowoll’s 11 a.m. visit. Lewis writes:
he presented us with some Anchovies which had been well cured in their manner. we foud them excellent. they were very acceptable particularly at this moment.
Clark’s version is virtually word-for-word, with the spelling “Cured” capitalized and “found” rendered correctly where Lewis dropped the n. The two diverge meaningfully on one point: Lewis records giving “the old man some small articles in return,” while Clark specifies the gifts — “a twisted wire to ware about his neck, and I gave him a par of old glovs which he was much pleased with.” Clark, the more attentive recorder of exchange specifics, supplies the inventory Lewis elides.
A subtler register difference appears in their characterizations of the chief. Lewis calls Comowoll “the most friendly and decent savage that we have met with,” while Clark, copying the same sentiment, substitutes “Indian” for “savage.” Whether deliberate or habitual, the swap is characteristic; Clark’s diction toward Native hosts during this winter is consistently less pejorative than Lewis’s.
Both captains then turn to the sick list — Hall’s foot injured by a falling log (Clark) or “large stick of timber” (Lewis), and Bratton’s persistent weakness — and lament their inability to procure “proper diet.” The shared phrasing reinforces that one entry is the source for the other.
The Ornithological Pivot
Where the captains depart most strikingly from Gass and Ordway is in the long natural-history appendix that follows the day’s events. Lewis offers a sweeping enumeration of the region’s aquatic birds:
the large blue and brown heron, fishing hawk, blue crested fisher, gulls of several species of the Coast, the large grey gull of the Columbia, Cormorant, loons of two species, white, and the brown brant, small and large geese, small and large Swan, the Duckinmallard, canvis back duck, red headed fishing duck, black and white duck, little brown duck, black duck, two speceis of divers, blue winged teal…
Clark, rather than copying this list verbatim as he often does, expands the entry into detailed species-by-species description. He distinguishes four species of larus (gull), describing the third as “about the Size of a well grown pullet, the wings are remarkably long in perpotion to the Size of the body,” and noting of a fourth white gull seen at “Haleys bay” that “on the base of the upper Chap there is an elivated orning of the Same Substance with the beak which forms the nostriels.” He extends the Cormorant entry by tracing the bird’s range “as high up the river as the enterance of the Chopunnish into the Kooskooske river.”
Here the usual copying relationship inverts: Clark elaborates where Lewis only lists. The pattern suggests both men were drafting natural-history material in parallel from shared field notes, with Clark on this date taking the descriptive lead while Lewis composed the taxonomic overview. Gass and Ordway, meanwhile, mention no birds at all — a reminder that the scientific dimension of the expedition’s record was, by March 1806, a captains-only undertaking.
