March 3, 1806 finds the Corps of Discovery becalmed at Fort Clatsop, four weeks from their planned April 1 departure. The day produces no events worth narrating — and yet it produces an unusually rich set of journal entries, because Meriwether Lewis turns inward to natural history while the captains’ shared housekeeping prose reveals, once again, the mechanics of how the expedition’s official record was made.
The Same Day in Four Registers
Patrick Gass, the carpenter-sergeant whose published 1807 journal would beat the captains’ to print by years, compresses the day to a single clause about the sick: they are “getting better but slowly, as they have little or no suitable nourishment.” Gass alone names the cause — diet — and his terse sentence frames the convalescence as a problem of supply rather than a medical curiosity.
John Ordway is equally economical but oriented to weather and labor: “wet day. the most of the men are dressing Skins &C.” Where Gass diagnoses, Ordway inventories. Together the two enlisted journalists give us, in fewer than thirty words combined, the working texture of the day: damp, tedious, productive of leather.
The captains, by contrast, write at length — and write nearly the same words. Clark opens:
Two of our Canoes have been lately injured very much in consequence of the tide leaveing them partially on Shore. they Split by this means with their own weight. we had them drawn out on Shore. our convalessents are Slowly on the recovery. La page is taken Sick. gave him Some of Scotts Pills which did not opperate. no movement of the party to day worthey of notice. every thing moves on in the old way and we are Counting the days which Seperate us from the 1st of April, & which bind us to Fort Clatsop.
Lewis writes the same passage almost verbatim, with only orthographic variation (“perogues” for Clark’s “Canoes,” “doze” for “Some,” “Scots” for “Scotts”). The phrase “every thing moves on in the old way” appears in both, as does the striking image of days that simultaneously “seperate” the party from April and “bind” them to the fort. Whichever captain drafted first, the other copied closely — a routine pattern at Fort Clatsop, where the long enforced leisure produced parallel rather than independent journals.
Lewis the Naturalist, Clark the Copyist
The divergence comes after the housekeeping paragraph. Lewis launches into a meticulous description of the large black and white pheasant — what modern ornithology calls the dusky or sooty grouse — beginning with range (“peculiar to that portion of the Rocky Mountain watered by the Columbia river”) and proceeding through size, tail-feather count (“eighteen feathers of equal length”), plumage, the curious featherless neck patches “about 2½ inches long and 1 In. in width,” the vermillion eye-stripe of “fleshey substance not protuberant but uneven with a number of minute rounded dots,” diet (“the berry of the sac-a-commis, and much also on the seed of the pine and fir”), and a homely simile comparing the bird to “that kind of dunghill fowl which the hen-wives of our country call dom-manicker.”
Clark, having copied Lewis’s opening paragraph, skips the long description of the large pheasant entirely and picks up at the small speckled pheasant — and there his text again tracks Lewis’s almost word for word. Clark then proceeds further than Lewis’s surviving entry, adding paragraphs on the small brown pheasant, on crows, ravens, and blackbirds (“the Crow here is much Smaller, yet its note is the Same”), on three species of hawks including “a hawk of an intermediate Size with a long tail and blewish coloured wings, remarkably Swift in flight and very ferce,” and on the “large hooting Owl” met “under the Rocky mountains on the Kooskooske R.”
The pattern is characteristic of the Fort Clatsop natural-history project: Lewis composes the foundational descriptions; Clark transcribes, occasionally truncating, occasionally extending. The captains are building a single zoological record in two hands.
What the Sergeants See That the Captains Don’t
It is worth noting what falls out of the captains’ long entries. Neither Lewis nor Clark mentions the rain that Ordway records, nor the skin-dressing that occupied most of the men. Neither names nourishment as the bottleneck on recovery, as Gass does. The captains note that Lapage is sick and that Scott’s Pills failed to operate; the sergeants note what the well men were doing and why the sick were not improving. Read together, the four entries for March 3 form a more complete day than any one of them alone — the captains supplying the pheasants and the medical log, the sergeants supplying the weather and the work.
