The journal entries for January 3, 1806 offer a rare and revealing instance in which Lewis and Clark, who routinely shared field notes and produced parallel daybook entries, diverge on a personal matter of taste. Meanwhile, the enlisted narrators Patrick Gass and John Ordway record the day from the practical vantage of men sent into the rain or worried about absent comrades, capturing details the captains omit.
Parallel Captains, Divergent Palates
Lewis and Clark’s entries for this Friday are textually almost identical — a clear case of one copying the other, with Clark generally following Lewis’s lead. Both record the visit of the Clatsop chief Comowool (Conia) and six others bringing roots, berries, three dogs, and a small quantity of fresh blubber obtained from the Callamucks (Tillamook), near whose village a whale had recently perished. Both note the return of Reubin Fields, Collins, and Potts after an unsuccessful hunt up the river feeding Meriwether’s Bay, and both draw the same managerial lesson about “taking time by the forelock” and keeping hunting parties in the field while meat remains.
Yet at one point the texts split sharply. Lewis writes:
for my own part I have become so perfectly reconciled to the dog that I think it an agreeable food and would prefer it vastly to lean Venison or Elk.
Clark, copying the surrounding paragraph almost verbatim, breaks ranks at exactly this sentence:
as for my own part I have not become reconsiled to the taste of this animal as yet.
The contrast is striking precisely because the rest of the passage is shared. Both captains agree, in identical phrasing, that the party had been “much more helthy Strong and more fleshey” while subsisting on dog than at any time since leaving buffalo country. The empirical observation is joint; the personal verdict is not. Clark’s willingness to alter the copied text at this single point indicates how carefully he tracked his own voice even within a largely shared journal practice.
What Gass and Ordway See That the Captains Do Not
The enlisted narrators provide texture the captains’ polished entries lack. Sergeant Gass, dispatched with George Shannon to the salt works to investigate the unexplained delay of Willard and Wiser, writes from the trail itself:
We proceeded along a dividing ridge, expecting to pass the heads of some creeks, which intervened. We travelled all day and could see no game; and the rain still continued.
Where Lewis records merely that he “Sent Sergt. Gass and George Shannon to the saltmakers,” Gass supplies the cold reality of the errand: a wet ridge walk, no game sighted, and a night spent gnawing marrow bones beside an old elk kill. The captains’ fort-bound entries register the dispatch; Gass alone registers the journey.
Ordway, writing from inside the fort, captures small events the captains pass over entirely. He notes that one of the hunters caught a large otter overnight, that natives gathered at the fort around ten o’clock, and — most pointedly — supplies a detail of camp hardship the captains discreetly omit:
had killed nothing but one Deer one Swan and 4 ducks, also a raven which they eat on new years day to Satisfy their hunger.
The eaten raven is precisely the kind of detail that would complicate Lewis’s confident reflection on dog flesh and bodily vigor. Ordway, less concerned with framing the expedition’s diet philosophically, simply records what was swallowed.
Weather, Register, and Audience
Clark alone opens with weather, observing that “the Sun rose fair this morning for the first time for Six weeks past” before clouds and rain returned, and recalling the previous night’s “Sharp lightening” and hail. Lewis’s parallel entry skips the meteorology entirely. The division of labor is consistent with Clark’s habitual role as the expedition’s weather diarist.
The four narrators thus produce a layered record of a single damp day at Fort Clatsop: Lewis composing a reflective fort entry that doubles as natural-history notebook (the small crow, the blue-crested Corvus, the brown wren, the bald eagle, the “beatifull Buzzard of the columbia”); Clark copying him faithfully but registering both the weather and a quiet dietary dissent; Gass walking the ridge in the rain; and Ordway logging otters, visitors, and a New Year’s raven. Read together, the entries show how thoroughly the expedition’s documentary practice depended on overlapping but non-identical witnesses.
