The journal entries for March 21, 1806 offer one of the clearest demonstrations of how the four principal Fort Clatsop diarists divided narrative labor. Lewis and Clark, preparing to abandon their winter quarters, produce nearly word-for-word accounts of provisioning crises and ailing men. John Ordway notes only a small fish trade. Patrick Gass, by contrast, uses the day as a launching point for an extended ethnographic survey of the coastal nations. The same twenty-four hours yield four very different documents.
The Captains in Lockstep
Lewis and Clark’s entries are so closely aligned that one is plainly the source of the other — a pattern recurring throughout the Fort Clatsop winter. Compare Clark’s opening:
Friday March 21st 1806 as we could not Set out we thought it best to Send out Some hunters and accordingly dispatched Shields and Collins on this Side of the Netul for that purpose with orders to return in the evening or Sooner if they were Successfull.
with Lewis’s:
Friday March 21st 1806. As we could not set out we thought it best to send out some hunters and accordingly dispatched Sheilds and Collins on this side the Netul for that purpose with orders to return in the evening or sooner if they were successfull.
The wording is identical save for spelling and minor prepositions (“on this Side of the Netul” versus “on this side the Netul”). One small but telling divergence appears in the provision count: Clark writes “we have not now more than two days provisions on hand,” while Lewis records “we have not now more than one day’s provision on hand.” Whether this reflects independent assessment, a copying error, or a quiet revision between the two men, it is the kind of discrepancy that complicates the assumption that one captain merely transcribed the other. Both then issue the same order — Drouillard and the Field brothers to hunt beyond Point William the next morning — and both express the same anxiety about the invalids Willard and Bratton, diagnosing rheumatism in nearly matched clinical phrasing.
Ordway’s Economy and a Chinookan Word
Ordway, as is his habit, condenses radically. Where the captains describe a failed hunt, sick men, and a Clatsop visit, Ordway records only a trade transaction:
a number of natives visited us with Some dryed small fish to trade which they call in their language Oil-can. we bought a fiew from them.
The detail Ordway preserves — the indigenous name for the dried fish (almost certainly eulachon, the oil-rich smelt the expedition repeatedly sought) — is exactly the sort of vernacular linguistic note the captains’ more administrative entries omit on this date. Ordway’s brevity is not poverty of observation; it is a different filter. He logs commerce and contact while the captains log command decisions.
Gass’s Ethnographic Departure
Gass takes the most striking liberty with the day’s narrative frame. After a single sentence noting that hunters went out and Clatsops visited, he abandons the daybook format entirely for a generalizing ethnography of the coastal nations — Clatsop, Chinook, Cathlamet, Calamex, and Chiltz — describing dress, language, mortuary practices, and sexual customs. He recalls a burial site he had observed earlier:
I believe I saw as many as an hundred canoes at one burying-place of the Chin-ooks, on the north side of the Columbia, at its entrance into Hailey’s Bay.
Gass’s editor (the journal was published in 1807 in a heavily reworked form) almost certainly shaped this passage, and its sweeping comparative tone — including a moralizing contrast praising the “Flatheads” for chastity against the alleged prostitution practices of coastal peoples — reflects early-nineteenth-century print conventions for travel narrative more than spontaneous field observation. Gass also records what the captains pass over: a specific anecdote of “An old Chin-ook squaw” who “frequently visited our quarters with nine girls.” The captains’ journals through the winter allude to such encounters obliquely; Gass’s published volume names them.
What the Day Reveals
Read together, the four entries expose the stratified documentation of the expedition. The captains write the official record — provisioning, personnel, medical status — in shared language. Ordway captures small commercial and linguistic facts the captains overlook. Gass, filtered through a printer’s hand, supplies generalized ethnography that the manuscript journals largely keep separate from daily entries. None of the four contradicts the others on the bare facts of March 21: hunters failed, Clatsops visited, two men were ill, provisions were dangerously low. But the meaning each writer extracts from those facts diverges sharply, and the cross-reading is what makes any single entry legible.
