The entries of March 1, 1806, offer an unusually clear specimen of the stratified record-keeping at Fort Clatsop. Four men — Lewis, Clark, Gass, and Ordway — wrote of the same day, but the resulting texts differ so dramatically in length and ambition that they read almost as products of separate enterprises. The sergeants’ notes run to a few sentences; the captains’ entries open into a multi-page natural history of the prairie hen.
Parallel Captains, Diverging Sergeants
Lewis and Clark’s entries for this date are textually near-identical, a pattern familiar to readers of the Fort Clatsop winter. Lewis writes:
This morning Sergt. Gass and a party set out in quest of the Elk which had been killed by the hunters the day before yesterday. they returned with the flesh of three of them late in the evening.
Clark’s version expands only slightly — “we despatched Sergt. Gass with 12 men in two Canoes” — adding the party’s size and conveyance, a detail Lewis omits. Whether Clark amplified Lewis’s draft or independently recorded the logistical specifics, the two captains plainly shared a working text. Their treatment of the visiting Killamuck man Kuskelar (Lewis) or Kuskalar (Clark) is also nearly verbatim, both noting the offered slave boy of about ten and observing that the coastal nations “adopt their slaves in their famelies and treat them very much like their own Children.”
The sergeants, meanwhile, write past the captains entirely. Gass mentions neither the elk hunt nor the Indian visitor, focusing instead on returning hunters who:
brought with them some thousands of the same kind of small fish, we got from the natives a few days ago, and also some sturgeon.
Ordway corroborates the elk party — “set out after the Elk meat, the day Showery and wet” — and is alone in recording the weather. Neither sergeant mentions Kuskelar or the slave boy, an omission worth noting: the captains treat the encounter as ethnographically significant, while the enlisted men either did not witness it or did not consider it journal-worthy.
The Kilhouanakkle and the Netul
Where Gass and Ordway converge most strikingly is in their shared interest in Indian place-names. Both record, on the same day, the Native designations for the rivers explored the previous day. Gass writes that the larger river is called “Kil-hou-a-nak-kle” and the small river by the fort “Ne-tul.” Ordway’s transcription is virtually identical — “Kil how-a-nak-kle” and “Ne-lut” — though his rendering of the second name appears to be a copying or hearing error for Netul. The captains, deep in their bird treatise, record neither name on this date. This is a recurring inversion at Fort Clatsop: the sergeants frequently preserve toponymic and quotidian detail that the captains, absorbed in scientific synthesis, let pass.
The Prairie Hen as Set Piece
The day’s defining literary event is the captains’ opening of a systematic ornithology. Lewis announces the framework:
The birds of the Western side of the Rocky Mountain to the Pacific Ocean, for convenience I shall divide into two classes, which I shal designate from the habits of the birds, Terrestrial and Aquatic.
Clark echoes the sentence and helpfully glosses it: “i e Fowls of the air, and fowls of the water.” The first species treated is the prairie hen, or grouse, with attention to the winter adaptation that most fascinated Lewis — the lateral scales fringing the toes:
the toes are also curiously bordered on their lower edges with narrow hard scales which are placed very close to each other and extend horizontally about 1/8 of an inch on each side of the toes thus adding to the width of the tread which nature seems bountifully to have furnished them at this season for passing over the snow with more ease.
Clark reproduces the passage almost word for word, with the minor substitution of “Praries” for Lewis’s “plains” in describing the bird’s foraging grounds. Clark also adds a behavioral note absent from Lewis: “they cohabit in flock & the Cocks fight verry much at those Seasons.” Whether this reflects Clark’s independent observation or a later addition is uncertain, but it is one of the few places where the secondary captain’s text exceeds the primary’s.
Registers in Contrast
The day illustrates the four-tier register of the expedition’s documentary record. Lewis composes in the voice of a naturalist preparing material for publication; Clark transcribes and lightly amends; Ordway logs the practical and the meteorological; Gass condenses to essentials and preserves Native vocabulary. A reader consulting only the captains would learn much about Tetraonid plumage and nothing about sturgeon, weather, or the spelling of Netul.
