The entries of January 23, 1806 offer an unusually clean specimen of the textual relationship among the Fort Clatsop journalists. Patrick Gass produces a two-sentence weather note; William Clark and Meriwether Lewis produce extended, near-identical paragraphs on hide-dressing difficulties and on the bulb of a coastal rush used by the Killamucks. The convergence of Lewis’s and Clark’s prose — and the divergence of Gass’s — illuminates the working method of the Corps’s winter encampment.
One Errand, Three Registers
All three men note the dispatch of Howard and Werner (Warner) to the saltworks. Gass strips the event to its bare administrative bone:
two men were sent on to the salt works. The day continued pleasant until about 4 o’clock in the afternoon, when the weather became cloudy, and it began to rain.
Gass alone records the weather break at four o’clock — a detail that vanishes from the more elaborate Lewis and Clark drafts. His sergeant’s-eye journal preserves the granular shape of the day while ignoring the natural-history program that consumes his officers. Clark, by contrast, opens with the same dispatch but immediately pivots to the garrison’s labor:
the men of the garrison are Still busily employed in dressing Elk Skins for cloathing, they fine great dificuelty for the want of branes; we have not Soap to Supply the deficiency, nor can we precure ashes to make the lye
Lewis’s parallel sentence is virtually identical, down to the curious observation that the local pine fuel yields no ash:
extrawdinary as it may seem, the greene wood is consoomed without leaving the residium of a particle of ashes.
The shared phrasing — "extrawdinary as it may seem," "residium of a particle of ashes" — confirms what scholars have long suspected for the Fort Clatsop months: Clark is copying Lewis (or both are copying a shared draft), preserving idiosyncratic spellings while quietly normalizing a few. Clark writes "cosumed" where Lewis writes "consoomed"; Clark renders the tribe as "Kil a mox" while Lewis writes "Killamucks."
The Rush Bulb: Lewis Drafts, Clark Abridges
The botanical description of the coastal rush demonstrates the directionality of the copying with particular clarity. Lewis’s account is fuller and more technical, deploying Linnaean vocabulary — "caulis," "radicle," "celindric," "stellate" — and including a passage Clark omits entirely:
a little above the junction of this radicle with the caulis, the latter is surrounded in a whorl with a set of small radicles from 6 to 9 inches long which are obliquely descending.
Clark’s version compresses the same plant into simpler terms, dropping the whorl of secondary radicles and reducing "caulis" to "Stem." Where Lewis specifies "long lineal stellate or radiate & horizontal leaves," Clark trims to "radiate & horizontal leaves." The pattern is consistent across the entry: Lewis supplies the botanical scaffolding; Clark retains the substance but pares the technical apparatus.
Clark, however, is not merely a copyist. He alone records a description and rough sketch of the digging implement used by the natives:
The instruments used by the nativs in digging their roots is a Strong Stick of three feet and a half long Sharpened at the lower end and its upper inserted into a part of an Elks or buck’s horn which Serves as a handle
This ethnographic addendum — absent from Lewis’s January 23 entry — suggests Clark was not simply transcribing but extending the record where his own observations or Indigenous informants had supplied additional material. The labeled diagram ("A is the lower part which is a little hooked B is the upper part or handle of Horn") is characteristic of Clark’s more visual, mechanical sensibility.
What the Pattern Reveals
Read together, the three entries map the division of labor at Fort Clatsop. Gass keeps a working day-book centered on garrison events and weather. Lewis composes the natural-history set pieces, drawing on his Philadelphia training. Clark transcribes Lewis’s drafts into his own journal, lightly modifying spelling and occasionally appending material Lewis did not include — here, the elk-horn digging stick. The salt detail and the ash-less pine fire are observed by all three but described by only two; the rush bulb is the property of the officers’ shared scientific project. The day’s small frustrations — no brains for the hides, no ashes for lye — are preserved verbatim across two journals, while the rain that began at four o’clock survives only because Gass bothered to look up.
