The journal entries for March 12, 1806, offer an unusually clear demonstration of how differently the four working diarists at Fort Clatsop handled a shared day. The external events are minimal: the weather cleared, a party went out a second time hunting for a missing canoe and again returned empty-handed, a single hunter was dispatched across the Netul, and Native visitors came to the post. Patrick Gass and John Ordway record essentially nothing more. William Clark and Meriwether Lewis, by contrast, treat the day as an occasion to compile lengthy zoological inventories — and in doing so reveal the close textual relationship between the two captains’ notebooks.
The Enlisted Men’s Brevity
Gass disposes of the day in a single sentence, noting only that the rain had “ceased, and we had a fine morning,” that natives visited, and that the hunters “returned, but had killed nothing.” Ordway is similarly terse, but his entry preserves a detail the others omit: the practical labor of the camp. While one man hunted and others searched fruitlessly for the lost canoe, the remaining boats were “corked & pitched” — readied for the homeward journey. Neither sergeant ventures into natural history. Their registers are operational: weather, hunt, task, result.
Clark and Lewis: Parallel Texts
The captains’ entries open with nearly identical sentences. Clark writes:
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’s version is virtually a transcription, with the substitution of “perogue” for “Canoe”:
We sent a party again in surch of the perogue but they returned unsuccessful) as yesterday. Sent one hunter out on this side of the Netul, he did not return this evening.
From this shared opening the two men diverge only briefly before converging again. Clark adds a logistical note absent in Lewis — that the party is now “furnished with 358 par of Mockersons” along with elk-skin shirts, overalls, and capotes for the return — a quartermaster’s accounting that fits Clark’s habitual concern with provisioning. Lewis, meanwhile, opens his entry with an extended description of the “Callamet Eagle,” a passage Clark does not reproduce on this date.
Then both men launch into the same fish catalog, in the same order, with nearly identical phrasing:
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.
The shellfish list — clam, periwinkle, mussel, cockle, and “a Species with a circular flat Shell” — is also shared verbatim, as is the discussion of how coastal Indians take whales by harpoon or salvage them when storms drive the carcasses ashore. The textual evidence strongly suggests that one captain copied from the other, or that both worked from a common draft. The pattern, repeated across many Fort Clatsop entries, indicates that the winter’s natural-history compilations were a coordinated editorial project rather than independent observation.
Details Unique to Each Captain
Where the texts diverge, each captain captures material the other misses. Lewis alone develops the calamet eagle passage, recording its economic value among interior nations:
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 also notes Arikara domestication of the bird for its plumage, and the practice of tying the feathers into the manes and tails of favored horses. Clark, by contrast, pushes further into reptiles and amphibians, describing garter snakes, the dark brown lizard first observed at “the long narrows,” oversized coastal snails (“at least five times” the bulk of those in the United States), and a curious water lizard taken above the grand rapid of the Columbia — nine inches long, pimpled, with unwebbed and clawless feet and a muskrat-like tail.
Read together, the four entries show the expedition’s documentary ecology in miniature: Gass and Ordway preserve the lived texture of a working garrison day, while Lewis and Clark — drawing on shared notes and dividing the natural-history labor between them — use the lull to build the systematic zoological record that would become one of the expedition’s most enduring contributions.
