The journal entries for January 19, 1806 offer a striking demonstration of how the Lewis and Clark expedition’s four working narrators could witness the same event and produce documents of vastly different scope and purpose. A small trading visit by two Clatsop men and a woman becomes, in the captains’ hands, the occasion for an extended ethnographic meditation; in the enlisted men’s journals, it remains a passing notation amid the steady labor of winter quarters.
Compression and Expansion
Gass dispatches the day in two clauses: weather, then visitors.
was fair with flying clouds; but in the evening it began to rain again. We had another visit from some of the natives.
Ordway expands only slightly, but his eye lands on something the captains will also notice — the hats — and on the work of the men inside the fort:
the men in the fort are employed dressing Elk Skins for Mockasons, &C. Several of the natives visited us, and sold us several handsome Hats made of some kind of Splits curiously worked &C.
Ordway’s phrase “some kind of Splits curiously worked” registers genuine puzzlement at an unfamiliar craft. Lewis and Clark, by contrast, will name the materials precisely — cedar bark and bear grass — and situate the object within a transatlantic fashion economy.
The Captains in Parallel
Lewis and Clark’s entries for this date are nearly verbatim twins, a pattern common at Fort Clatsop where the captains shared field notes and ethnographic observations. Compare Lewis’s opening:
This morning sent out two parties of hunters, consisting of Collins and Willard whom we sent down the bay towards point Adams, and Labuish and Shannon whom we sent up Fort River
with Clark’s:
This morning Sent out two parties of hunters, one party towards Point adams and the other party up Ne tel River by water.
Lewis names the hunters; Clark omits them but supplies the Native name “Ne tel” where Lewis writes “Fort River.” Such small divergences suggest one captain drafted and the other copied with selective edits, though which direction the borrowing ran on this date is ambiguous. Clark also dates the entry “Tuesday” while Lewis writes “Monday” — January 19, 1806 was in fact a Sunday, an error shared in different forms by both men.
On the hats themselves, the two texts converge almost word for word. Clark writes that the form is
that which was in voge in the U States and Great Britain in 1800 & 1801 with a high Crown rather larger at the top than where it joins the brim
— a remarkable detail noting that Clatsop weavers were producing headwear shaped to recent Euro-American fashion, almost certainly because maritime traders had brought such hats as models or specifications. Lewis preserves the observation identically, calling it “a small article of traffic with the Clatsops and Chinnooks who dispose of them to the whites.”
Chieftainship Without Heredity
The longer ethnographic passage — on household composition, polygamy, and political authority — is where the captains’ shared project is most visible. Both record that several families share a single room in apparent harmony, that the eldest man is not necessarily the household head, and that monogamy is the norm though plural marriage is permitted. Most striking is their parallel theory of Clatsop chieftainship. Lewis writes:
the creation of a chief depends upon the upright deportment of the individual & his ability and disposition to render service to the community; and his authority or the deference paid him is in exact equilibrio with the popularity or voluntary esteem he has acquired
Clark’s version substitutes “upright Conduct” for “upright deportment” and “extent equilibrio” for “exact equilibrio” — likely a transcription slip — but the analytical framework is identical: authority as earned, non-hereditary, and proportionate to consent. Both captains close with the same candid disclaimer:
not being able to Speak their language we have not been able to inform ourselves of the existance of any peculiar Customs among them.
The contrast across the four narrators is instructive. Gass and Ordway record the visit; Lewis and Clark theorize it. Yet Ordway’s attention to the hats as objects of admiration anticipates the captains’ fuller treatment, and his note that the men inside were dressing elk skins reminds the reader that the ethnographic essay was composed in a fort where most hands were occupied with leather, not literature.
