March 12, 1806, at Fort Clatsop. Four published journals survive for the day in this corpus: Patrick Gass (1807, David McKeehan’s prose), John Ordway, William Clark, and Meriwether Lewis. Joseph Whitehouse does not. Thwaites’s original Whitehouse text ends 6 November 1805.
Gass and Ordway
Gass’s printed sentence begins in the weather and ends in the hunt:
ceased, and we had a fine morning. A number of the natives visited us; and at night our hunters returned, but had killed nothing.
Ordway does not mention visitors or a fine morning. He records camp labor and names himself in the canoe search:
one man went out a hunting. I went and made Search for the lost canoe but could not find it. the other canoes corked & pitched.
The corking and pitching is his alone. Neither sergeant writes natural history this day.
Clark and Lewis: shared daybook
The captains open in near-copy. Clark:
We Sent a party again in Serch of the Canoe but they returned unsucksessfull as yesterday Sent one hunter out on this Side of the Netul he did not return this evening.
Lewis writes the same search with “perogue” for canoe, and the same hunter who did not return. Gass’s hunters who came back with nothing, and Ordway’s one man out hunting, sit beside that single missing hunter. The captains do not report a kill, and they do not report Native visitors.
Both then give the same fish list, in the same order. Clark:
the Whale, Porpus, Skaite, flounder, Salmon, red-carr, two Specis of Salmon trout, mountain or Speckled trout, and a Speceis Similar to one of those noticed on the Missouri within the mountains, called in the Eastern States, bottle nose.
Lewis has “red charr” and “bottle-nose,” otherwise the same. The shellfish — clam, periwinkle, mussel, cockle, and “a Species with a circular flat Shell” — are shared, as is the account of whales harpooned or driven on the rocks in storms, the blubber and oil eaten, the whalebone saved for sale. Clark specifies rocks “to S. S. W.”; Lewis writes of whales “runing fowl on the rocks of the coast in violent storms.”
The 358 moccasins appear in both books. Clark places the inventory early and adds clothing Lewis omits:
Our party are now furnished with 358 par of Mockersons exclusive of a good portion of Dressed leather, they are also previded with Shirts Overalls Capoes of dressed Elk Skins for the homeward journey.
Lewis closes with the moccasin count and dressed leather only.
Eagle, bat, reptiles
Lewis alone writes the Callamet Eagle this day — black and white, twelve tail feathers white with about two inches of “jut black” at the tip, a white spot in each extended wing, smaller and “much more fleet” than the bald eagle. The economic note:
two tails of this bird is esteemed by the Mandans Minetares Ricares, &c as the full value of a good horse, or gun and accoutrements.
He adds that among the Great and little Osages, and nations where the bird is rarer, the price is double; that the Ricares have domesticated the bird for its plumage; that feathers are tied into hair and into the manes and tails of favorite horses; and that the name comes from decorating callamet stems, “which has generally obtained among the Engages.” He also notes “The leather winged batt common to the United States” west of the mountains. Clark has none of that on this date.
Clark alone then lists reptiles: rattlesnake, garter snake, common brown lizard. The garter snake is “very common” on open and marshy ground and does not differ from those of the United States. The dark brown lizard was seen “at the long narrows.” Coastal snails have the United States shape “but are at least five times their bulk.” He describes one water lizard taken “just above the grand rapid of the Columbia,” about nine inches long, dark brown and pimpled, four toes in front and five behind, unwebbed and “destitute of tallons,” the tail like a muskrat’s, brick-red beneath. He closes with elk horns: some not yet fallen, others grown to six inches, “the latter are in the best order.”
Read across four pens, March 12 is a garrison day in Gass and Ordway — fair morning, visitors, a lost canoe, boats pitched — and a divided zoological compilation in the captains, eagle and bat in Lewis, reptiles and the water lizard in Clark, fish and moccasins in both.
