The journal entries of February 24th, 1806 offer an unusually clean demonstration of how the Corps of Discovery distributed its documentary labor during the long winter at Fort Clatsop. Three narrators — John Ordway, Meriwether Lewis, and William Clark — describe the same external events: the return of hunters Shannon and Labiche without elk, and the arrival of the Clatsop chief Comowooll’s party with Drouillard, bearing hats, sturgeon, a sea otter skin, and a small running fish. Yet each writer treats this shared raw material so differently that the entries together reveal the captains’ deliberate division of natural-historical work.
Three Registers for One Event
Ordway’s entry is the briefest and most utilitarian. He compresses the day into a logistical summary:
Drewyer retorned and a number of Indians with him they brought some hats and fresh fish. our officers bought a Sea otter Skin and Several hats for the party, the two hunters came to the Fort had killed only one Elk.
Notably, Ordway reports that the hunters “had killed only one Elk,” while both Lewis and Clark state they “had killed no Elk.” This discrepancy — a single sergeant’s-eye accounting against the captains’ identical phrasing — suggests Ordway may have written from camp talk before the hunters’ full report reached him, or that the captains synchronized their wording independently of him.
Lewis and Clark, by contrast, open with nearly verbatim parallel paragraphs. Lewis writes that the elk “have retired from their former haunts and gone further back in the country,” while Clark records they “have returned from their former haunts and gorn further back in the mountains.” The shared lament — “poor and inferior as the flesh of this animal is it is our principal dependance for subsistence” — appears in both, with only minor orthographic variation. This is the familiar pattern of the Fort Clatsop winter: one captain drafts, the other copies and lightly adapts.
The Eulachon and the Squirrels: A Deliberate Split
What makes February 24th remarkable is what happens after the shared opening. The captains diverge entirely. Lewis devotes the remainder of his entry to the small fish brought by the Clatsops — almost certainly the eulachon, or candlefish — producing one of the most celebrated descriptive passages in the journals. He sketches the fish “as large as life” on the page itself and itemizes its anatomy with taxonomic precision: the fin-ray counts (“the fins next to the gills have eleven rays each. those of the abdomen have eight each”), the coloration of the gill plates (“of a bluis cast, and the second of a light goald colour”), the dentition (“it has no teeth”), and the placement within Linnaean categories (“the Malacopterygious Order & Class Clupea”).
Lewis then breaks scholarly composure for one of his rare aesthetic judgments:
they are so fat they require no additional sauce, and I think them superior to any fish I ever tasted, even more delicate and lussious than the white fish of the lakes which have heretofore formed my standart of excellence among the fishes.
Clark, meanwhile, writes nothing of the eulachon. Instead, he turns to the mammals of the region, producing detailed descriptions of the raccoon, the large gray squirrel of the Columbia oak country, the small brown squirrel of the pine forests, and the small gray squirrel of the Rocky Mountains. His prose is methodical rather than rapturous: pelage colors, body proportions, habitat preferences, native uses (“the nativs make great use of those Skins in forming their robes”).
A Coordinated Documentary Strategy
The pattern suggests the captains agreed to split the natural-history workload for the day. Where their accounts of camp business converge almost word-for-word, their scientific contributions are entirely complementary: Lewis takes the new fish, Clark takes the regional mammals. Neither duplicates the other. This is more sophisticated than mere copying — it is editorial coordination, with each captain producing original content in his assigned domain while preserving a shared official record of expedition events.
Ordway, removed from this scientific project, captures what the captains’ polished narratives partly obscure: that the day’s central transaction was a trade, conducted by “our officers,” for hats and a sea otter skin. His brevity is its own kind of testimony, reminding the reader that for the enlisted men the Clatsops’ visit was a commercial event, not a chapter in American natural history. Read together, the three entries show the Fort Clatsop journals operating as an integrated documentary system — redundant where redundancy mattered for verification, divided where division multiplied the expedition’s scientific yield.
