The journal entries for February 28, 1806 offer an unusually clean specimen for cross-narrator comparison. All four diarists — Lewis, Clark, Gass, and Ordway — are confined at Fort Clatsop, all describe the same hunting returns, yet the resulting texts differ sharply in length, register, and ethnographic attention. Read together, they expose the documentary hierarchy that governed the expedition’s record-keeping during the Pacific winter.
Parallel Texts: Lewis and Clark in Lockstep
The closest pairing is, predictably, Lewis and Clark. Their entries open with nearly identical sentences and proceed through the same sequence: the Field-Collins hunting departure, the visit of the Clatsop man Kuskelar, the sturgeon transaction, and the late return of Shields, Joseph Field, and Shannon with five elk. Lewis writes:
they brought some Anchovies, Sturgeon, a beaver robe, and some roots for sail tho they asked so high a price for every article that we purchased nothing but a part of a Sturgeon for which we gave a few fishing hooks.
Clark’s version is virtually a transcription, with characteristic spelling shifts (“Sale” for “sail,” “fiew” for “few”):
they asked Such high prices for every article that we purchased nothing but a part of a Sturgeon for which we gave a fiew fishing hooks.
Clark, however, adds a detail Lewis omits: that Kuskelar brought a small boy, “a Slave, who he informed me was his Cook, and offerd to Sell him to me for beeds & a gun.” This is a significant ethnographic note about Lower Columbia slaveholding practice — and it appears only in Clark’s manuscript. Whether Lewis suppressed the offer or simply did not witness it, the divergence is a reminder that the captains’ parallel journals are not redundant: each preserves material the other loses.
The Hare: A Shared Natural History
Following the day’s narrative, both captains pivot to a long zoological description of the hare of the Columbia plains. The texts are again nearly identical, down to the measurements (“from the extremity of the hinder, to that of the fore feet when extended 3 F.”) and the description of the eye’s “deep sea green” pupil occupying one-third of its diameter. Lewis’s version preserves the seasonal coloration note — that the animal turns “a pure white” from mid-November to mid-April except for the unchanging ears — while Clark’s surviving manuscript breaks off mid-sentence at the same passage. The shared phrasing strongly suggests one narrator drafted the description and the other copied, with Lewis likely the originator given his consistent role as the expedition’s lead naturalist.
The Enlisted Men: Brevity and a Different Geography
Sergeant Ordway’s entry compresses the entire day into three sentences. He notes that “Seven men Set out eairly with a canoe after the Elk meat” and that the three returning hunters had killed five elk “near a small River 7 or 8 miles from this place.” He records neither Kuskelar’s visit, nor the sturgeon, nor the hare. His register is purely operational: who went out, who came back, what was killed.
Sergeant Gass is briefer still for the 28th — a single sentence about a sergeant and six men retrieving meat, and three hunters returning with five elk. But Gass’s published narrative then rolls forward into March 1, where he supplies a detail neither captain mentions in this window:
There is a large river that flows into the southeast part of Hailey’s Bay; upon which about 20 miles from its mouth, our hunters discovered falls, which had about 60 feet of a perpendicular pitch.
This geographic note — the falls on a tributary of Haley’s Bay — is the kind of secondhand intelligence the captains often absorbed silently into later compilations. That it surfaces first in Gass’s published 1807 text is a useful reminder that the sergeants’ journals sometimes preserve field rumor and discovery on a faster timeline than the captains’ more curated entries.
Patterns of Attention
The four entries together sketch a clear division of labor. Lewis and Clark co-produce the official record: ethnographic encounter, commercial transaction, and natural history, with each captain occasionally retaining a unique detail. Ordway and Gass keep the logistical spine — men out, men in, meat secured — and Gass alone reaches outward to terrain features beyond the fort’s immediate orbit. The Clatsop visitor Kuskelar, the offered child, the high-priced sturgeon, and the silver-eyed hare exist in the documentary record only because two of the four journalists thought such things worth writing down.
