The journal entries for March 15, 1806 offer a textbook case of how the four principal expedition narrators distributed their attention across a single day at Fort Clatsop. Patrick Gass and John Ordway condense the day into a few practical sentences; William Clark and Meriwether Lewis produce nearly identical extended entries that move from camp logistics to ethnographic encounter to natural history. Reading the four accounts together exposes both the chain of textual dependence among the captains and the sharply different registers of the enlisted journal-keepers.
The Hunters’ Return: Compression and Detail
All four narrators record that hunters returned to the fort having killed four elk. Gass reduces the event to a single clause:
noon our hunters came in and had killed four elk. A number of the natives came to the fort to-day.
Ordway adds operational texture — Drouillard and five men dispatched to the Cathlamet village for a canoe, "all hands turned out and brought in the meat" — and distinguishes the visitors as members of "the Chinnock nation" with "Some of the Clatsops also." Clark and Lewis, by contrast, supply the explanatory anecdote that the others omit entirely: Labiche (Lewis spells him "Labuish," Clark "Labiesh") was the only hunter who fell in with elk, and
haveing by some accident lost the foresight of his gun Shot a great number of times and only killed four.
Both captains also note that one elk’s meat had become "putred" (Clark) or "putrid" (Lewis) because the liver and pluck had been "carelessly left in the Animal all night." That this detail surfaces only in the captains’ journals — and in nearly identical phrasing — confirms what is by now a familiar pattern in the Fort Clatsop entries: Lewis and Clark are working in close textual concert, while Gass and Ordway draft from their own briefer notes.
Delashelwilt’s Party and a Cautionary Charge
The afternoon visitors receive strikingly uneven treatment. Gass mentions only "a number of the natives." Ordway notes the Chinook and Clatsop arrivals but does not name them. Clark and Lewis, however, identify the party precisely — Delashelwilt, his wife, and six women — and both flag the visit as a recurrence of a known problem. Clark writes:
this was the Same party which had communicated the venereal to Several of our party in November last, and of which.they have finally recovered. I therefore gave the men a particular Charge with respect to them which they promised me to observe.
Lewis’s version is verbally almost identical, differing chiefly in spelling ("venerial," "rispect") and in characterizing the November infection as having spread to "so many of our party" rather than Clark’s "Several." The near-duplication suggests one captain copied from the other or both worked from a shared draft; the small variants are characteristic of the independent transcription rather than verbatim copying. Notably, the enlisted men’s journals do not mention the venereal episode at all — a register difference that recurs throughout the Fort Clatsop winter, where matters of camp discipline and sexual conduct remain the captains’ province.
The Third Species of Brant
The most revealing divergence comes in the natural-history section that fills the latter half of Clark’s and Lewis’s entries and is wholly absent from Gass and Ordway. Both captains describe a "third Species of Brant" weighing about 8½ pounds, with a tail of eighteen feathers, an orange-yellow leg, and a flesh-colored beak. The descriptions track each other phrase by phrase — "the breast and belly are white with an irregular mixture of black feathers which give that part a pided appearance" — yet small differences identify Clark as the copyist working from Lewis’s draft. Clark’s closing line reads "we first met w[ith]" before breaking off; Lewis completes the thought: "first saw them below tide-water." The truncation in Clark’s manuscript, paired with his characteristic spellings ("Colour," "dureing," "puple" for "pupil"), is consistent with the established pattern of Clark transcribing Lewis’s zoological observations into his own journal.
That Gass and Ordway record neither the brant nor Bratton’s continuing illness ("Bratten is still very weak and unwell," Clark; "Bratton still sick," Lewis) underscores the division of labor among the journal-keepers during the final weeks at Fort Clatsop: the sergeants log events; the captains log events plus people, science, and the ongoing medical and disciplinary state of the Corps.
