The journals of February 4th, 1806 offer an unusually clear demonstration of how the four principal Fort Clatsop diarists distributed narrative labor. The same day’s events — a meat-hauling party, the salt works, and Lewis’s ongoing botanical survey — appear in registers ranging from a single sentence to a multi-paragraph scientific description. Read together, the entries map the hierarchy of authorship that governed the winter quarters’ record-keeping.
The Logistics Layer: Ordway and Gass
The enlisted journalists treat the day as routine camp business. Ordway’s entry is the briefest in the corpus, recording only that
the Six men Set out again with the canoe after the Elk meat tide high.
Gass, writing at slightly greater length, attends to a different transaction — the return of the salt-works party — and folds two days into one notation:
the men, who had gone to carry the meat to the salt works, returned and brought us a bushel of salt. This day continued throughout clear and pleasant; and the 5th was a clear cool day. One of our hunters came in, who had killed 6 elk.
Neither sergeant mentions Drewyer by name, neither describes the elk’s forage, and neither notices the firs. Their concern is the camp’s caloric and material economy: pounds of meat, bushels of salt, weather suitable for travel. Gass uniquely supplies the salt-bushel figure and the hunter’s tally of six elk — details Lewis and Clark omit entirely.
The Captains in Parallel
Lewis and Clark, by contrast, produce nearly identical entries running to several hundred words. The textual relationship is one of close copying with minor orthographic and lexical variation. Compare Clark’s opening,
Serjt. Pryor with a party of 5 men Set out again in quest of the Elk which Drewyer had Killed. Drewyer also returned to continue the Chase in the Same quarter.
with Lewis’s,
Sergt. Pryor with a party of five men set out again in quest of the Elk which Drewyer had killed. Drewyer and La Page also returned to continue the chase in the same quarter.
The substance is the same, but Lewis names La Page where Clark drops him — a small but consistent pattern across the Fort Clatsop winter, in which Lewis’s roster is often slightly fuller. Clark’s spelling (“Surcumferonce,” “woddey,” “defuse,” “maney”) diverges from Lewis’s somewhat steadier hand, but the syntactic frame is shared sentence by sentence, suggesting Clark transcribed from Lewis’s draft (or the reverse) rather than composing independently.
Both captains observe that elk in the prairie point are in better flesh than those in the timbered country, and both identify the principal browse plants: grass and rushes in open ground; huckleberry, fern, and the laurel-like evergreen shrub — salal, which Clark renders as “Shal-lon” — in the woods. Clark uniquely preserves the indigenous-derived name; Lewis suppresses it in favor of pure description. This is a recurring divergence: Clark tends to retain vernacular and Native terminology that Lewis edits out in pursuit of a more Linnaean register.
Numbering the Firs
The bulk of both captains’ entries is given over to the first of several fir species Lewis intends to catalogue — almost certainly the Sitka spruce or Douglas-fir of the Pacific slope. The measurements are extraordinary:
they frequently rise to the hight of 230 feet, and one hundred and twenty or 30 of that hight without a limb.
Lewis frames the project methodically: “for the convenience of comparison with each other shal number them. (No 1.)” Clark mirrors the framing nearly verbatim. One revealing discrepancy lies in the leaf measurement. Clark records the needle as “1/2 a line in width”; Lewis writes “1/10th of an Inch in width.” Since a line is approximately one-twelfth of an inch, half a line and one-tenth of an inch are roughly equivalent — but Clark has used the older British apothecary unit while Lewis has converted to decimal inches, a small index of the captains’ differing technical idioms.
Lewis also adds the botanical term “sessile” describing the needles’ attachment, which Clark omits — consistent with Lewis’s role as the expedition’s principal naturalist. Clark, on this date, follows; he does not lead the description.
Taken together, the four entries for February 4th show the Fort Clatsop journal system functioning as designed: Ordway and Gass log operations, Lewis composes natural history, and Clark produces a parallel fair copy that preserves and occasionally varies Lewis’s language while filtering it through his own orthography and vocabulary.
