The entries for March 5, 1806 offer an unusually clear window into the editorial hierarchy at Fort Clatsop. Four narrators — Patrick Gass, John Ordway, William Clark, and Meriwether Lewis — record the same sequence of events: a Clatsop trading visit, the return of empty-handed hunters, and (in the captains’ versions) a strategic deliberation about when to abandon winter quarters. Yet the four accounts differ so sharply in length and register that they read almost as different days.
The Sergeants’ Compression
Gass and Ordway each dispatch the day in a single sentence. Gass notes that the rain
ceased, and we had a fine morning. A number of the natives visited us; and at night our hunters returned, but had killed nothing.
Ordway, characteristically more interested in goods than weather, records only that
natives came to the fort and brought us some little fish and Stur- geon &C.
Between them, the two sergeants supply the bare facts: weather, visitors, fish, failed hunt. Neither registers alarm. Neither mentions the strategic conversation that — judging from the captains’ entries — must have consumed much of the day. Gass notices the hunters’ empty-handedness but draws no inference from it; Ordway notices the trade goods but not the hunters at all. The complementarity is striking: read together, the two sergeants reconstruct the day’s commerce and its outcome, but neither glimpses its meaning.
The Captains in Near-Lockstep
Clark and Lewis, by contrast, produce entries that are nearly identical — a reminder that during the Fort Clatsop winter the two captains routinely shared a single draft, with one copying from the other. Compare Clark’s opening:
This morning we were visited by two parties of Clatsops they brought Some fish, a hat and Some Skins for Sale most of which we purchased
with Lewis’s:
This morning we were visited by two parties of Clatsops. they brought some fish a hat and some skins for sale most of which we purchased.
The divergences are almost entirely orthographic — Clark’s habitual capitalizations (“Some,” “Skins”) against Lewis’s lower case, Clark’s “reather alarming” against Lewis’s “reather allarming.” The substantive content is shared verbatim: the failed hunt on the Kil-haw-a-nack-kle, the report that elk had “gorn off to the mountains,” the two days’ spoiled provisions, the dispatch of Sergeant Pryor up the Columbia to buy fish from Indian fishermen, and the contingency plan to ascend the river slowly through March rather than venture early onto the treeless plains.
That plan is the day’s real news, and it surfaces only in the captains’ journals. The decision to potentially leave Fort Clatsop ahead of the announced April 1 departure — “unless the want of Subsistance compels us to that measure” — is a major shift, and it is invisible in the sergeants’ entries.
Where the Two Captains Diverge
The shared narrative ends with the elk crisis. From there, both captains pivot to natural history, and here a small but telling gap opens. Clark’s bird catalogue runs longer than Lewis’s. Both men list the common snipe, the sand snipe, the sparrow of the woody country, and the curlew; both note that many summer and autumn species “had departed before our arrival.” But Clark continues where Lewis stops, adding a substantial inventory of
the large blue and brown heron, fishing Hawk, blue crested fisher, Gulls of Several Species of the Coast, the large grey Gull of the Columbia, Comorant, loons of two Species, white and the brown brant, Small and large Geese, small and large Swans, the Duckinmallard, canvis back Duck, red headed fishing Duck
and several more. Clark also closes with a geographic detail Lewis omits entirely: the hunters’ report of
a very Considerable fall in the Kit-haw-a-nack-kle River on its main western fork at which place it falls abt. 100 feet from the Side of a mountain
This reverses the more common pattern in which Lewis is the fuller naturalist and Clark the geographer. On March 5 it is Clark who carries the zoological catalogue further and who preserves the topographic intelligence brought back by the returning hunters. Whether Lewis simply stopped copying, or whether Clark expanded a shared draft on his own initiative, the result is that Clark’s entry is the more complete record of the day.
Reading the Four Together
The day’s full texture emerges only when the four narrators are read in concert. Gass supplies the weather. Ordway names the sturgeon. Lewis and Clark frame the strategic stakes. Clark alone preserves the waterfall and the longer bird list. The empty-handed hunters who walk through Gass’s single sentence are, in Clark’s telling, the trigger for a contingency plan that would reshape the expedition’s spring.
