A Garrison on Short Rations
The entries from Fort Clatsop on this Wednesday converge on a single anxiety: food. Clark and Lewis open their journals with nearly identical sentences detailing the dispersal of hunting and fishing parties — Drewyer and two men sent up the Columbia after sturgeon and anchovy, Shields with Joseph Fields and Shannon up the Netul for elk, and Reubin Fields working the point toward Point Adams. The parallel phrasing confirms what scholars have long observed for the Fort Clatsop winter: the captains were sharing a common journal text, with Clark’s version reproducing Lewis’s prose almost verbatim, distinguished mainly by Clark’s heavier orthography (“unsucksessfull,” “minnamum,” “liveing”) against Lewis’s smoother spelling.
Clark permits himself one small departure of tone. Where Lewis dryly notes “a comfortable prospect for good living,” Clark sharpens the irony:
what a prospect for good liveing at Fort Clatsop at present.
Both men acknowledge that the storehouse holds only “three days provision only in store and that of the most inferior dryed Elk a little tainted.”
The Enlisted View
The sergeants record the same day with characteristic economy. Patrick Gass condenses the elaborate captains’ dispatch into a single sentence — “hunters went out, as our store of provisions was getting small, and three men went in search of these small fish” — and then jumps ahead to report the result on the 27th: an elk killed, the crisis briefly relieved. Gass routinely compresses two days into one paragraph, a pattern visible across his Fort Clatsop entries.
John Ordway adds a detail the captains omit. While Lewis and Clark describe Drewyer’s party as going “up the Columbia River to take Sturgion and Anchovey,” Ordway notes that three men went “with a canoe to the Clatsop and cathlemaks village to purchase fresh fish and wapa-toes.” Ordway’s mention of wapato — the starchy tuber that had become a dietary staple of the lower Columbia winter — and his naming of the Cathlamet village suggest he may be describing a separate party, or simply preserving information the captains generalized away. The pattern recurs throughout the journals: Ordway often catches the trade goods and Indigenous place-names that Lewis abstracts into bureaucratic phrasing (“a few articles such as the natives are pleased with”).
Lewis the Naturalist, Working from Skins
The bulk of the day’s writing is given over to natural history, and here Clark’s copying becomes most evident. Both captains produce nearly word-for-word descriptions of the sewelel — the mountain beaver (Aplodontia rufa) — whose skins the Clatsop and Chinook sewed into robes. Lewis writes:
Sewelel is the Chinnook and Clatsop name for a small animal found in the timbered country on this coast… I have never seen the animal and can therefore discribe it only from the skin and a slight view which some of our hunters have obtained of the living animal.
Clark’s version preserves the substance exactly, with minor spelling variants (“Se we lel,” “sinears,” “discribe”). The descriptive passage is a model of cautious zoology: Lewis catalogues the dressed skin’s dimensions (14–18 inches by 7–9), the texture of the fur (“very fine, short, thickly set and silky”), and the redish-brown color, while flagging the limits of his knowledge. The tail is missing because the natives sever it; the ears he reconstructs from the pelt; the behavior — running up a tree “like a squirrel” before vanishing into a ground burrow — comes secondhand from one of the men. He guesses at the genus (Mustela, or perhaps a “brown mungo”) and admits frustration: he has “offered them considerable rewards to furnish me with one, but have not been able to make them comprehend me.”
The diverging detail between the two captains is small but telling. Lewis says he had a coat made “of the skins of the tiger cat” lined with sewelel robes. Clark records that he himself made a westcoat of sea otter, while “Capt Lewis a Tiger Cat Skin Coat loined with them also.” Clark, copying, has clarified the ownership — a reminder that even in passages of near-identical prose, Clark sometimes inserts the small biographical anchor that locates each captain in his own wardrobe.
Together the four entries sketch the texture of late-winter Fort Clatsop: hunger driving men outward in every compass direction, sergeants tallying outcomes, and Lewis filling the long hours of waiting by interrogating a robe for the animal hidden inside it.
