The entries for January 13, 1806, offer an unusually clear window into how the four principal Fort Clatsop journalists handled a single day’s events. The morning’s task was simple: retrieve the meat of seven elk killed the previous day. All four narrators record this errand, but the resulting entries differ dramatically in scale and scope—from Patrick Gass’s single sentence to the captains’ multi-paragraph treatises on Pacific coastal commerce.
The Same Errand, Four Registers
Gass, working in his characteristically compressed style, dispatches the day in a line:
wet day; and all the hands, who could be spared were engaged in bringing the meat of the elk, killed yesterday to camp.
John Ordway, a sergeant whose journal often runs slightly fuller than Gass’s, adds the operational detail that six men remained behind to preserve the meat:
Capt Lewis and all the party except the guard went after the Elk meat. Six men set jurking the meat to keep it from Spoiling.
Ordway’s note that Lewis personally led the retrieval party is corroborated by Lewis himself (“I took all the men who could be spared”) and by Clark (“Capt. Lewis took all the men which Could be Speared”). Gass, by contrast, omits the captain’s role entirely. The enlisted-man journals here function as terse logbooks; the officers’ journals as expansive narratives.
Clark Copying Lewis—Or Lewis Copying Clark?
The most striking feature of the day’s record is the near-verbatim agreement between Lewis and Clark. Compare their reports of the candle situation. Lewis writes:
this evening we exhausted the last of our candles, but fortunately had taken the precaution to bring with us moulds and wick, by means of which and some Elk’s tallow in our possession we do not yet consider ourselves destitute of this necessary article
Clark records:
this evening we finished all last of our Candles, we brought with us, but fortunately had taken the precaution to bring with us moulds and wick, by means of which and Some Elk tallow in our possession we do not think our Selves distitute of this necessary article
The phrasing is too close to be independent. The captains shared notes throughout the winter, and on this date Clark appears to have copied Lewis (or both worked from a common draft), preserving Lewis’s clauses while substituting his own spellings (“distitute,” “Speared”) and occasional word choices (“finished” for “exhausted”). Both men also note, in identical observation, that the elk killed near Fort Clatsop “have a verry Small portion of tallow”—a detail neither Gass nor Ordway thought worth recording, but one with immediate practical consequence for candlemaking.
The Ethnography of the Coastal Trade
Where the captains’ entries diverge most interestingly from those of the sergeants is in their long ethnographic appendix on the Pacific maritime trade. Both Lewis and Clark devote the bulk of their entries to describing the seasonal arrival of European and American trading vessels at Cape Disappointment, the bay in which they anchor, and the Indigenous nations who travel there to barter.
Lewis’s catalogue of coastal nations is notably more detailed than Clark’s. Lewis names, for the southeastern coast, “The Clatsop, Killamuck, Ne-cost, Nat-ti, Nat-chies, Tarl-che, E-slitch, You-cone and So-see,” while Clark abbreviates this to “the Clat Sops, Kil-a-mox, and those to the N W.” The discrepancy suggests Lewis was working from fuller field notes or interview records, and that Clark—copying or paraphrasing—condensed where his source ran long.
Both captains identify the Skilloots as the key intermediaries between coastal peoples and the riverine Eneeshur, Echelute, and Chilluckkittequaw nations who supply the pounded salmon that anchors the regional economy. Their description of the trading bay—”spacious and commodious, and perfectly secure from all except the S. and S. E. winds”—reads almost as a navigational brief, the kind of intelligence Jefferson would expect from an expedition charged with assessing the commercial geography of the continent.
The day’s records thus illustrate a recurring pattern in the Fort Clatsop journals: the sergeants document the camp’s labor, while the captains, freed by winter quarters from the daily demands of travel, use repetitive days to compile the ethnographic and commercial reports that were, in many ways, the expedition’s true cargo. Gass and Ordway tell us what was done. Lewis and Clark tell us what it meant for the imperial future of the Columbia.
