The journals for March 18, 1806 (mistakenly headed March 17 by Clark) capture Fort Clatsop in the final, fretful days before the return journey. Four narrators — Lewis, Clark, Ordway, and Gass — describe the same wet, hail-spattered day, but their accounts diverge sharply in scope and emphasis. Lewis and Clark devote long paragraphs to a diplomatic-historical gesture of considerable ambition; Ordway and Gass compress the day’s labor into a few utilitarian lines. Read together, the four entries expose how rank and literary purpose filtered what each man considered worth recording.
Twin Captains, One Document
Lewis and Clark’s entries for the day are nearly identical in substance, a pattern familiar throughout the Fort Clatsop winter. Both record that Drouillard was bled for a violent pain in his side, that Sergeant Pryor was directed to prepare two canoes whose seams could not be payed because frequent showers prevented the wood from drying, and that Comowooll and two Cathlahmahs were permitted to stay the night. The verbal overlap is striking. Clark writes,
Drewyer was taken last night with a violent pain in his Side. I bled him. Several of the men are complaining of being unwell. it is truly unfortunate that they Should be Sick at the moment of our departure.
Lewis records the same sentences almost verbatim, shifting only to third person: “Capt. Clark blead him.” The textual evidence suggests one captain copied from the other — a routine of shared composition that produced redundancy as a kind of insurance against loss.
The centerpiece of both captains’ entries is the certificate-and-list scheme. Having given Delashelwilt a certificate of good deportment and a roster of expedition names, the captains posted a copy in their quarters and distributed others among the natives. The preamble both men transcribe is identical in wording, framing the document as a message in a bottle directed at the “informed world”:
The Object of this list is, that through the medium of Some civilized person who may See the Same, it may be made known to the informed world, that the party consisting of the persons whoes names are hereunto annexed… did penetrate the Same by way of the Missouri and Columbia rivers, to the discharge of the latter into the Pacific Ocian.
One small but telling divergence: Clark anticipates being “devided into two or three parties” on the return, while Lewis writes “three or four parties.” The discrepancy hints that planning was still fluid, and that the two captains were not always in lockstep about the shape of the homeward journey.
What the Sergeants Saw
Ordway and Gass tell a smaller, more practical story — and Ordway tells one the captains conspicuously omit. While Lewis and Clark describe the courteous reception of Comowooll, the Clatsop chief, Ordway records that on the same day four men crossed to the prairie to seize a Clatsop canoe:
4 men went over to the prarie near the coast to take a canoe which belongd to the Clatsop Indians, as we are in want of it… the others took the canoe near the fort and concealed it, as the chief of the Clatsops is now here.
The juxtaposition is pointed. The captains entertain Comowooll under their roof while, by Ordway’s account, members of the party hide a stolen canoe from him nearby. Ordway makes no moral comment, but the editorial silence in Lewis’s and Clark’s parallel entries is itself revealing. The official record preserves the diplomatic surface; the sergeant’s record preserves the appropriation beneath.
Gass, characteristically, is the most laconic of the four. His entry mentions hail, repairs to the small canoes, preparations to ascend the river, and a single hunting result: “One of the hunters killed an elk.” He does not name Joseph Field, whom both captains credit, nor Drouillard, whose otter and illness dominate the captains’ pages. Gass also collapses two days into one paragraph, gliding directly into March 19th’s stormy morning — a reminder that his published 1807 narrative was redacted from field notes with less concern for daily granularity.
Registers of Record
The four entries form a useful cross-section of expedition documentation. Lewis and Clark write for posterity and for the federal government, embedding a formal Latinate preamble and a sketch map of the Missouri-Columbia connection on the backs of their lists. Ordway writes for himself, noting the day’s tasks and, almost incidentally, an act of petty theft the captains chose not to chronicle. Gass writes the barest summary, sufficient to mark weather and labor. Drouillard’s illness, the elk, the hail, and the Clatsop canoe each appear in different combinations across the four texts — and only by reading them in parallel does the full texture of March 18, 1806 at Fort Clatsop come into view.
