The entries of December 1, 1805 offer an unusually clear demonstration of how the four working journalists of the Lewis and Clark expedition apportioned the labor of observation. On a single cloudy, windy Sunday near the future site of Fort Clatsop, John Ordway, Patrick Gass, William Clark, and Meriwether Lewis each produced a record — and the four texts barely overlap. Where Ordway compresses the day into a single clause, Lewis fills paragraphs with shrubs and squirrels. The contrast illuminates both the division of narrative labor and the temperaments shaping it.
Hunger in Miniature: Ordway and Gass
The enlisted journalists deliver the day at its barest. Ordway’s entire entry reads:
our men are unwell living on pounded sammon only.
Eleven words carry the central material fact of the encampment: a diet reduced to pounded salmon traded from Chinookan neighbors, and bodies beginning to fail under it. Gass complements rather than duplicates this, turning to the failed remedy:
cloudy. Some of the hunters went out but had not the fortune to kill any thing, not even a duck.
The phrase “not even a duck” registers the scale of the disappointment — even small game eluded the parties. Read together, Ordway and Gass form a complete two-sentence report: the men are sick from monotonous fish, and hunting has produced nothing to vary the ration. Neither sergeant ventures beyond this. Their registers are practical, oral in cadence, and almost interchangeable in function with a quartermaster’s log.
Clark’s Literary Sea
Clark, by contrast, drafts the same day twice — a field entry and a fuller fair-copy version — and uses the second pass to develop one of the most quoted passages of the winter. He confirms the hunters’ failure (“my hunters returned without any thing”) and the dietary monotony (“the dried fish, which is our Standing friend”), but his attention drifts seaward:
The emence Seas and waves which breake on the rocks & Coasts to the S W. & N W roars like an emence fall at a distance, and this roaring has continued ever Since our arrival in the neighbourhood of the Sea Coast which has been 24 days Since we arrived in Sight of the Great Western; (for I cannot Say Pacific) Ocian as I have not Seen one pacific day Since my arrival in its vicinity
The parenthetical pun — refusing the name “Pacific” because no “pacific day” has appeared — is absent from the field draft, where Clark writes only the seed of the joke (“I cant Say Pasific as Since I have Seen it, it has been the reverse”). The expansion between drafts shows Clark consciously crafting a publishable voice: the second version sharpens diction (“tempestous and horiable”), elaborates the simile (“like an emence fall at a distance” rather than “repeeted roling thunder”), and closes with a note of separation from his co-captain: “I have no account of Capt. Lewis Since he left me.” Clark, alone among the four, treats December 1 as material for narrative rather than reportage.
Lewis the Naturalist
Lewis’s entry, written from the small reconnaissance party Clark mentions missing, ignores the sea entirely. After a brief operational note — Drouillard still out, the other hunters returned reporting wood “so thick it was almost impenetrable” — he turns to systematic natural history. He describes the gray squirrel of the region (“their bellies are of a redish yellow, or tanners ooze colour the tale flat and as long as the body”), then runs through a catalogue: green brier, large-leaved ash, black alder, blue-berried elder, seven-bark, low cranberry, and a wild crab whose fruit he compares carefully to eastern analogues:
the fruit consists of little oval hurries which grow in clusters at the extremities of the twigs like the black haws. the fruit is of a brown colour, oval form and about double as large as the black haw
This is the Lewis the expedition’s scientific patrons hoped for: comparative, measured, willing to suspend the day’s narrative to fix a species in prose. Tellingly, he closes not with weather or supper but with acoustic hope — “heard him shoot 5 times just above us and am in hopes he has fallen in with a gang of elk” — the same elk that Clark’s hunters had only glimpsed.
Patterns Across the Four
The cross-narrator pattern on this date is one of complementary specialization rather than copying. Ordway and Gass do not appear to share text, but they share a register and between them cover the camp’s bodily condition. Clark and Lewis, physically separated, divide the higher rhetorical labor: Clark takes the sea and the sentiment, Lewis takes the flora and fauna. Only the failed hunt and the cloudy easterly wind appear in more than one journal, anchoring the four accounts to a shared day while each narrator pursues the subject his temperament — and the captains’ implicit division of duties — had assigned him.
This analysis was AI-assisted and reviewed by a human editor prior to publication.
