The party’s first full day of upriver travel after departing Fort Clatsop produced four journal entries describing the same camp on Deer Island (E-lal-lar) in the lower Columbia. The hunters had pressed ahead the previous evening; by mid-morning the main party caught up to find seven deer already killed and two leaky canoes in need of pitch. All four narrators record these basic facts. Their divergences — in register, in observational focus, and in textual dependence — illuminate how the expedition’s record was actually built.
Lewis and Clark: The Shared Draft and Its Divergence
The entries by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark for this date are nearly identical in their opening paragraphs, a familiar pattern in the post-Fort Clatsop journals where the captains share a common text. Both write that they arrived at “an old Indian Village” at 9 A.M., both record the tail of the buck “upwards of 17 Inches long,” and both supply the Chinookan name:
the Indians call this large Island E-lal-lar or deer island which is a very appropriate name.
Both note that the hunters reported “upwards of a hundred Deer” on the island, and both list the same waterfowl — geese, ducks, swan, sandhill cranes, and the canvasback. The texts run in lockstep until Lewis breaks away into a long, technical description of an unfamiliar duck killed by one of the hunters. Where Clark moves on to practical matters — the canoes pitched and reloaded, a visit from ten Quathlahpohtle in a large canoe, the snakes underfoot — Lewis devotes nearly half his entry to the duck’s plumage, beak, and feet:
the beak of this duck is remarkably wide, and is 2 inches in length, the upper chap exceeds the under one in both length and width, insomuch that when the beak is closed the under is entirly concealed by the upper chap.
This is Lewis the naturalist, working in a register Clark seldom adopts. Clark instead extends the day’s record with ethnographic and diplomatic detail Lewis omits — the visiting Quathlahpohtles, the river name “Chfih-w&h-na-hi-ooks,” and a careful description of the snakes (“black with a narrow Stripe of light yellow along the Center of the back, with small red spots on each Side”) with blanks left for the scuta count he intended to fill in later.
Gass and Ordway: The Enlisted Men’s View
Sergeants Patrick Gass and John Ordway write independently of the captains and of each other, in shorter, plainer prose. Both fix on the same vivid image the captains underplay: the sheer density of snakes. Ordway writes that “the Snakes are as thick as the Spears of Grass on this Island,” and Gass uses almost the identical simile:
On this island there are a greater number of snakes, than I had ever seen in any other place; they appeared almost as numerous as the blades of grass.
The shared phrasing suggests either a common camp expression circulating among the men or one sergeant’s familiarity with the other’s notes. Either way, the figure of speech is absent from both captains’ entries — Clark’s snake passage is taxonomic, not impressionistic.
Ordway and Clark both note the loss of deer carcasses to scavengers, but with characteristic differences. Clark calls the birds “Voulturs”; Ordway specifies “grey Eagles” and adds a small revenge — “some of the hunters killed Several of them.” Gass, characteristically practical, records only the loss and the salvage:
they found that the fowls had devoured four of the carcases entirely, except the bones. So they brought in the other two.
Gass alone among the four narrators registers an ethnographic observation the captains miss entirely on this date — a change in women’s dress as the party moves upriver from the coast:
Instead of the short petticoat, they have a piece of thin dressed skin tied tight round their loins, with a narrow slip coming up between their thighs.
This is the kind of detail Lewis often supplies in his ethnographic set-pieces, but here it is the carpenter-sergeant who notes the regional transition.
One Day, Four Lenses
The same five-mile day, recorded four times, becomes four different days. Lewis produces a naturalist’s monograph on a single duck. Clark records diplomacy, geography, and herpetology. Ordway logs weather (“Squawlley high winds”), game, and a wildcat. Gass alone notices the women’s clothing and counts the rescued carcasses. The repairs to the canoes — the practical reason the party stopped at all — appear in every entry but occupy the foreground in none. Read together, the four texts demonstrate how the expedition’s collective record depended on overlapping but non-redundant attention: what one narrator omitted, another almost always supplied.
