The journal entries for January 12, 1806 offer an unusually clear case study in how the four Fort Clatsop narrators — Lewis, Clark, Ordway, and Gass — handled a single day’s events. The captains’ entries are nearly identical in substance, while the enlisted journalists preserve fragments and details that flesh out the day’s labor.
The Captains in Near-Perfect Parallel
Lewis and Clark’s entries for January 12 are textbook examples of the cross-copying that characterizes much of the Fort Clatsop journals. Both open with the dispatch of Drouillard and a single companion to hunt, and both close with the same administrative decision about meat distribution. Clark writes:
Drewyer haveing killed 7 Elk; I scercely know how we Should Subsist, I beleive but badly if it was not for the exertions of this excellent hunter
Lewis renders the same sentiment with only minor orthographic variation:
Drewyer having killed seven Elk; I scarcely know how we should subsist were it not for the exertions of this excellet hunter.
The phrasing is so close that one entry was almost certainly drafted from the other, or both from a shared field note. What differs is what each captain adds at the margins. Lewis opens with information Clark omits entirely — that the men sent to recover a missing canoe had returned empty-handed: “we therefore give her over as lost.” Clark, by contrast, develops the praise of Drouillard at greater length, contrasting him with the other hunters who “not being accquainted with the best method of finding and killing the elk” return unsuccessful. Lewis compresses this; Clark editorializes.
A New Rationing Policy
Both captains record, in nearly identical language, the policy shift that the seven-elk windfall prompted. Lewis explains:
We have heretofore usually divided the meat when first killed among the four messes into which we have divided our party leaving to each the care of preserving and the discretion of using it, but we find that they make such prodigal use of it when they hapen to have a tolerable stock on hand that we have determined to adapt a different system
Clark’s version substitutes “distribution of useing it” for Lewis’s “discretion of using it” — a small but telling drift, since Lewis’s word more precisely captures the disciplinary concern. The new system, both agree, was “to jerk it and issue it to them in Small quantities.” This is one of the relatively rare moments in the winter journals where the captains explicitly document a shift in camp administration, and the doubled record underscores its perceived importance.
What Ordway and Gass Preserve
Ordway, writing in his characteristically clipped register, confirms the bare facts: “3 men went again to look for the canoe but did not find it… the 2 hunters who went out this morning came in had killed 7 Elk within about 2 miles of the f[ort].” The detail of distance — “within about 2 miles” — appears nowhere in the captains’ accounts and is the kind of practical, spatial information Ordway often supplies that the officers omit.
Gass’s entry illustrates a different problem: his published narrative compresses several days into one paragraph. His text for this period describes men “sent to the salt works,” others “drying and taking care of the meat; and in dressing elk skins for mockasins, which is a laborious business.” The complaint about moccasin-making — “we have no alternative in this part of the country” — is pure Gass, and it captures the texture of enlisted labor that Lewis and Clark, focused on hunting yields and rationing policy, do not record. Gass also folds in events of January 14, 16, and 17, including a visit by “8 of the natives of the Clatsop nation,” suggesting his manuscript or its later editor consolidated entries.
Patterns of the Day
Three patterns emerge. First, Lewis and Clark function as a single editorial voice on matters of policy and praise, with Lewis tending toward precision and Clark toward emphasis. Second, Ordway supplies quantitative detail — distances, counts, locations — that the captains routinely omit. Third, Gass alone registers the unglamorous skin-dressing and salt-making that filled the days between Drouillard’s hunts. Together, the four entries document not just what happened on January 12, but how rank and role shaped what each man thought worth writing down.
