The journal entries for January 17, 1806 offer an unusually clear window into how the captains divided — and duplicated — the labor of recordkeeping at Fort Clatsop. Three narrators cover the day, but the volume and texture of their entries diverge sharply. Sergeant John Ordway compresses the day into a single fragmentary line about Native visitors and a hunter’s deer. Lewis and Clark, by contrast, produce extensive parallel entries that track one another almost sentence for sentence, covering a frustrated sea-otter negotiation and a detailed ethnographic survey of Clatsop culinary vessels and basketry.
Parallel Pens: Lewis and Clark on the Sea Otter Trade
The textual relationship between Lewis’s and Clark’s entries is striking. Both open with the same framing — the visit of Comowool and seven Clatsops — and both proceed through identical episodes in the same order: the unsold roots and berries, Comowool’s gift exchange for an awl and thread, the failed sea otter negotiation, Colter’s deer, and Drouillard’s departure to hunt elk and trap beaver. The phrasing is so close that one entry was almost certainly copied from the other, with only minor orthographic and lexical variations. Clark writes,
one of the party was dressed in three verry elegant Sea otter Skins which we much wanted; for these we offered him maney articles but he would not dispose of them for aney other Consideration but Blue beeds
Lewis records the same scene in nearly identical words, substituting “eligant” and “beads” for Clark’s spellings. Both note that the captains had only six fathoms of blue beads remaining — four short of the asking price per skin — and both record the Chinookan term for these prized beads. Clark renders it “Tia com ma shuck,” Lewis “tia Commashuck,” each glossing it as “Chief beads.” The episode neatly captures the expedition’s dwindling trade leverage in its final winter on the Pacific: knives and ordinary beads will not move premium goods, and the captains lack the specific currency the Clatsops demand.
Ethnography of Bowls and Baskets
Both captains then pivot to a sustained description of Clatsop material culture — wooden bowls, troughs, spoons, spits, and especially baskets. Here small differences in observation emerge. Clark catalogs bowl shapes as “round, Square or in the form of a canoe,” while Lewis offers a more elaborated typology: “round or simi globular, in the form of a canoe, cubic, and cubic at top terminating in a globe at bottom.” Lewis also describes the bowls as “neatly carved,” where Clark writes “neetly covered” — a difference that may reflect either a transcription slip or genuinely different attention to ornament versus lids.
On basketry, the two accounts converge again. Both describe the watertight cedar-bark and beargrass weave, the dyed ornamental strands, the conic form, and the dual function as water vessel and head-borne carrier. Clark notes the weave is done “withe hands or fingers,” Lewis simply “with the fingers.” Both identify beargrass as a trade article precisely because it grows only in the high mountains near the snow line, and both give the blade dimensions as roughly 3/8 of an inch wide and two feet long. The convergence suggests shared field observation, with one captain drafting and the other transcribing — a working method consistent with the Fort Clatsop winter, when the captains used the long, wet days to consolidate ethnographic and natural-history notes.
Ordway’s Spare Register
Against the captains’ parallel ethnographic essays, Ordway’s entry registers an entirely different scale of attention. He notes only that
ber of the natives came to the fort, about noon one of the hunters came in with a Deer which he had killed.
Ordway records the same two facts the captains record — the Native visit and the deer — but strips them of names, numbers, transactions, and ethnographic context. For Ordway, January 17 is a quiet day at the fort: visitors came, a hunter returned with meat. The captains, by contrast, treat the visit as both a commercial encounter and an opportunity to extend their growing inventory of Clatsop material culture. The contrast reflects not negligence on Ordway’s part but a fundamentally different scribal mission. Sergeants kept the operational log; the captains were assembling the report that would justify the expedition to Jefferson and the public.
Read together, the three entries show the expedition’s documentary apparatus working at full capacity: redundant captain-level coverage to guard against loss, a sergeant’s parallel operational record, and — in the duplicated passages — evidence of the collaborative drafting that produced the journals’ richest ethnographic chapters.
