The journal entries for February 22, 1806 offer an unusually clear window into how the Lewis and Clark expedition’s documentary apparatus functioned at Fort Clatsop. Four narrators record the same day, but the resulting texts diverge sharply in length, register, and apparent purpose. Lewis and Clark produce nearly parallel paragraphs running to several hundred words apiece; Ordway musters two sentences from a sickbed; and Gass, writing later from notes, folds the day into a brief multi-day summary.
Twin Entries from the Captains
Lewis and Clark’s accounts of the visit by two Clatsop women and two boys are textually so close that one was almost certainly copied from the other or from a shared draft. Lewis writes:
We were visited today by two Clatsop women and two boys who brought a parsel of excellent hats made of Cedar bark and ornamented with beargrass. two of these hats had been made by measures which Capt Clark and myself had given one of the women some time since with a request to make each of us a hat; they fit us very well, and are in the form we desired them.
Clark’s version differs only in spelling and minor word order:
two of those hats had been made by measure which Capt Lewis and my Self had given a woman Some time Since, with a request to make each of us a hat; they fit us very well, and are in the form we desired them.
The detail is significant ethnographically: the Clatsop weaver took European-style measurements and delivered custom-fitted headwear, a small but striking instance of cross-cultural commercial adaptation. Both captains follow with identical praise for Clatsop craftsmanship — “the woodwork and sculpture of these people as well as these hats and their waterproof baskets evince an ingenuity by no means common among the Aborigenes of America” — and both pivot to the same natural-history digressions on the antelope and the mountain sheep, the latter known to them only through trade goods and native-dressed skins.
Where the two diverge is in the roster of the sick. Lewis lists “Gibson, Bratton, Sergt. Ordway, Willard and McNeal,” while Clark writes “Gibson, Bratten, Willard McNeal and Baptiest LaPage,” omitting Ordway from the sick list and adding LePage, then noting separately that “Serjt. Ordway is complaining of a Coald & head ake.” Clark also expands the symptom description to include “a violent pain in the head, and back,” details Lewis omits. The variation suggests the captains compared notes but did not mechanically transcribe; each filtered the day through his own attention.
Ordway from Inside the Sickroom
Sergeant Ordway’s entry confirms Clark’s diagnosis from the patient’s own perspective. He records that he is “Some better. I am full of pains but not verry sick,” and notes the visit only glancingly:
Several of the natives came to the Fort with some of their Split a chip hats which are Engeaneously made Drewyer went to the village &C.
Ordway’s phrase “Split a chip hats” — a phonetic rendering of a Chinookan term — preserves a piece of vernacular nomenclature the captains discard in favor of descriptive English. His brevity is the brevity of illness, not indifference: where Lewis and Clark elaborate Clatsop ingenuity into a paragraph of admiration, Ordway compresses the same judgment into the single word “Engeaneously.”
Gass’s Retrospective Compression
Gass, whose published 1807 journal often rolls several days into a single paragraph, treats February 22 as the opening clause of a longer weather-and-trade summary running through February 24:
natives again visited us, and brought some hats which we pur- chased at a moderate price. The 23rd was also clear and pleasant; but the morning of the 24th was cloudy, and at 10 o’clock it began to rain hard.
Gass strips the encounter of its specifics — no measurements, no named visitors, no weaver, no waterproof baskets, no influenza, no antelope, no sheep. What survives in his account is only the commercial fact: hats arrived, hats were bought, the price was fair. The contrast underscores how much of what scholars now treat as the canonical Fort Clatsop ethnography depends on the captains’ habit of expansive daily reflection — a habit Gass and Ordway, writing under different constraints, did not share.
Patterns Across the Four
Three patterns emerge. First, Lewis and Clark’s parallel entries on this date confirm a working method of shared drafting on ethnographic and zoological set pieces, with each captain introducing small independent variations. Second, Ordway’s entry serves as a useful check on Clark’s medical reporting, anchoring the captains’ “influenza” hypothesis in a first-person symptom report. Third, Gass’s compression reveals what an expedition journal looks like when stripped to bare commercial and meteorological facts — a reminder that the richness of the Clatsop winter record is largely a product of two specific pens.
