The second of January 1806 was, by all accounts, an unremarkable day at Fort Clatsop: a party retrieved two elk killed the day before, a band of trading Indians departed at one in the afternoon, Drouillard checked his traps and found an otter, and the men contended with rain and a rising population of fleas in their new quarters. Yet the four surviving accounts of this single day — by Patrick Gass, John Ordway, William Clark, and Meriwether Lewis — offer a useful case study in how the expedition’s documentary record was layered, copied, and selectively expanded.
The Sergeants’ Brevity
Patrick Gass disposes of the day in a single line, noting only that “men went out in the morning and brought the meat of the elk into the Fort.” He omits the number of men, the hour of return, the visiting Indians, the otter, and the fleas. John Ordway is somewhat fuller, recording that “14 men went out and brought in the meat” and that the captains “issued an order for the regulation of the Garrison at this place, charging the party to treat the natives will &C.” Notably, Ordway is the only narrator on this date to mention the issuance of the garrison regulations — a significant administrative act that Lewis and Clark themselves pass over in their journals for January 2.
This is a useful reminder that the captains’ entries, despite their literary polish, are not exhaustive. The enlisted journals occasionally preserve events the officers neglected, even as they generally lack the captains’ descriptive sweep.
Lewis and Clark: A Study in Copying
The entries by Clark and Lewis for this date are nearly identical in substance and largely identical in wording, confirming what scholars have long observed about the Fort Clatsop winter: one captain was copying the other, with Lewis almost certainly the source and Clark the transcriber (with light orthographic variation). Compare Clark’s complaint —
we are infestd. with Sworms of flees already in our new habatations; the presumption is therefore Strong that we Shall not devest our Selves of this intolerably troublesom vermin dureing our residence here.
— with Lewis’s:
we are infested with swarms of flees already in our new habitations; the presumption is therefore strong that we shall not devest ourselves of this intolerably troublesome vermin during our residence here.
The sentences are word-for-word identical apart from spelling. The same congruence holds for the catalogue of waterfowl still present in the neighborhood — swans, sandhill cranes, geese, brant, cormorant, mallard, canvasback — and for the observation about Drouillard’s otter. Clark opens his entry with a weather note absent from Lewis (“A Cloudy rainey morning after a wet night”), suggesting he prefaced the shared text with his own meteorological observation before transcribing.
One small but telling divergence appears at the close. Lewis extends the remark on beaver and otter fur with a comparative note: the animals are “by no means as much so as on the upper part of the Missouri.” Clark omits this comparison. Such trailing differences often mark the point at which the copying narrator set down his pen, while the originating author continued composing.
Register and Attention
Beyond textual dependence, the four entries differ in what they think worth noticing. Gass writes as a working soldier: meat came in. Ordway writes as a sergeant attentive to command and discipline: he counts the detail at fourteen men and registers the new regulations. Clark and Lewis, writing as naturalists and chroniclers, devote the bulk of their entries to fauna, fur quality, and the prospect of a flea-bitten winter. The Indians who visited the previous day receive a brief, transactional notice — they had come to dispose of “their roots and berries for a fiew fishing hooks and Some other Small articles” — with no individual names or descriptions.
Read in parallel, the four accounts illustrate the layered authorship of the expedition’s record: a shared set of facts, filtered through different ranks, purposes, and writing habits, with the captains’ journals showing the unmistakable signs of mutual copying that would shape the published narrative for generations of readers.
