The entries of March 8, 1806, offer a useful case study in how the four Fort Clatsop journalists allocated attention. The same hunting parties return, the same weather sets in, and the same elk are butchered — yet each narrator constructs a notably different document. Patrick Gass and John Ordway, the enlisted diarists, produce brief operational notes. William Clark and Meriwether Lewis, writing in close partnership, produce parallel long-form entries dominated by natural history.
Hunters’ Returns: Compression and Expansion
Gass offers the most compressed account of the day. He notes the weather, the arrival of “another of our hunters” with two elk, and the later return of three more men who “killed but one deer, and lost their canoe.” The lost canoe — a logistical mishap of real consequence in a country where watercraft enabled meat transport — receives a single dependent clause.
Ordway, writing at slightly greater length, adds operational texture Gass omits. He records that
Six men set out by water after the meat of one Elk. Drewyer & J° Fields went out a hunting, the day cold and Showery, in the evening the men returned to the fort with the meat of the Elk.
Where Gass reports outcomes, Ordway reports movements: who was dispatched, by what means, and when they returned. The two enlisted journals together reconstruct the day’s labor, but neither names the hunter who came in early. That detail belongs to the captains.
Clark identifies him as Collins, and credits him with three elk rather than Gass’s two — the discrepancy likely reflecting that one carcass “fell in a deep pond of water and he could not git to it.” Gass apparently counted only the elk recovered; Clark counted the elk killed. Clark also notes Bratton’s improving back, McNeal and Goodrich’s recovery from “the Louis veneri” and his order that they “desist from takeing the murcury,” and Willard’s low spirits — a roster of medical conditions entirely absent from the enlisted journals.
Lewis and Clark in Parallel
The Lewis and Clark entries for this date are nearly identical in wording, a pattern characteristic of the Fort Clatsop period when the two captains shared notes freely. Lewis writes that Collins “butcherd and secured” the two elk; Clark writes that Collins “butchered and Saved” them. Lewis directs the mercury patients “to desist from the uce of mercury”; Clark writes that he “detected [directed] them to desist from takeing the murcury or useing in future.” The substantive content tracks line by line.
One small zoological discrepancy is worth flagging. Lewis describes the white brant as “about the size of the brown brant or a third less than the common Canadian or wild goose.” Clark renders the same sentence as “a little larger than the brown brant and a fourth less than the common wild or Canadian goose.” Whether Clark was working from an earlier Lewis draft, or whether one captain miscopied the other, the variation suggests that the copying ran in at least one direction with active — if imperfect — transcription rather than mechanical duplication.
The White Brant: A Naturalist’s Set Piece
The bulk of both captains’ entries is given over to a detailed description of the white brant (the snow goose) and the brown or “pieded” brant. Lewis catalogues beak, legs, tail (“composed of sixteen feathers of equal length”), eye, wing proportions, and plumage, and compares the bird’s vocalization to
the note of young domestic goose which has not perfectly attained it’s full note.
He concludes that “the flesh of this bird is exceedingly fine, preferable to either the goose or pided brant” — a judgment that combines field naturalism with the practical interests of a wintering camp dependent on waterfowl and elk. Clark reproduces the description in full, including the culinary verdict.
Gass and Ordway record no birds. The division of labor is clear: the enlisted men chronicle the day’s work, while the captains — particularly Lewis — use the same day to advance a systematic natural history of the lower Columbia. Read together, the four entries show how a single date at Fort Clatsop could be simultaneously a logistical entry, a medical report, and a chapter in early American ornithology.
