January 25, 1806 produced four journal entries from Fort Clatsop that, read together, illuminate both the daily anxieties of a hungry winter camp and the textual habits of the expedition’s writers. The captains report on departing Clatsop visitors, returning hunters, and an ethnobotanical inventory of local berries. The enlisted men, Patrick Gass and John Ordway, record what the captains pass over in silence: the weather, and the bare arithmetic of meat brought in.
Twin Entries: Lewis and Clark in Parallel
The most striking feature of the day’s record is the near-verbatim agreement between Meriwether Lewis and William Clark. Both open with the same sentence — Clark writing that "Commowol and the Clatsops departed early this morning," Lewis writing "Commowooll and the Clatsops departed early this morning." Both then relay Colter’s report that Willard had continued hunting from Point Adams toward the saltmakers, and both close the news section with Collins’s discouraging account from the salt camp:
they had made about one bushel of Salt and that himself and two others had hunted from the Salt Camp for five days without killing any thing and they had been obliged to Subsist on Some whale which they purchased from the nativs-. (Clark)
Lewis’s version differs only in spelling and in one telling verb: where Clark writes "purchased," Lewis writes "procured." The parallel structure suggests one entry was copied from the other, or both were drafted from a shared set of notes — a working method consistent with other Fort Clatsop entries this winter. Lewis’s hand may be the source: he extends the entry with an ethnographic addendum about coastal bands southeast of the Killamucks that Clark does not transcribe, suggesting Clark copied the shared portion and stopped.
The Berry Catalogue and Its Small Variants
Both captains follow the news of the day with an inventory of native fruits: the deep purple Shal-lun (salal), the pale red Sol’-me, a vining berry, a brown berry resembling black haw, and the scarlet sac a commis (kinnikinnick or bearberry). Clark calls the vining plant the "low brown berry"; Lewis writes the "low Crambury." The slip is instructive — "Crambury" (cranberry) is almost certainly the correct identification, and Clark’s "brown" appears to be a miscopying of Lewis’s word. Such errors run in one direction: from Lewis’s draft into Clark’s fair copy.
Lewis alone preserves the etymology of sac a commis, explaining that French-Canadian engagés of the North West Company carried the leaves "in a small bag for the purpose of smokeing of which they are excessively fond." Both men leave a blank where the Indian name for the berry should appear — a shared lacuna that further confirms a shared source document.
What the Sergeants See
Patrick Gass and John Ordway, writing without access to the captains’ notes, record an entirely different stratum of camp life. Gass attends to weather with the precision of a man who must work outdoors in it:
of snow fell in the course of the day; and in the night it fell to the depth of 8 inches… it began to freeze hard. This is the first freezing weather of any consequence we have had during the winter.
Neither Lewis nor Clark mentions the snow or the freeze — a meteorological milestone for the Pacific winter that survives only in Gass’s record. Ordway, similarly, opens with "more Snow fell intermixet with hail, continues Squawlly this morning," and reduces the saltmakers’ news to its grim essential: "2 men came from the Salt Camps, had been a hunting but killed nothing except the deer which was brought in yesterday."
Ordway’s compression strips away Collins’s name, the bushel of salt, and the whale purchased from the natives — the very details the captains preserve. Where Lewis and Clark write as commanders accounting for personnel, supplies, and ethnographic data, Ordway writes as a man tallying mouths and meat. The register difference is total: the captains’ prose is administrative and scholarly; the sergeants’ is laconic and weather-bound.
A Composite Day
Read in isolation, no single entry conveys the full texture of January 25. The captains supply names, ethnobotany, and the saltmakers’ dependence on purchased whale meat. Gass supplies the snow depth and the season’s first hard freeze. Ordway supplies the squally morning and the blunt fact of empty-handed hunters. Together they document a fort settling deeper into winter, fed by trade rather than the rifle, while its officers turn their attention from the gun to the notebook.
