The entries of February 15, 1806, capture a single event from radically different vantage points: Sergeant Pryor’s late-day arrival at Fort Clatsop with the ailing George Gibson, carried overland in a litter from the salt works on the coast. Three narrators — John Ordway, Meriwether Lewis, and William Clark — record the episode, but the differences in length, register, and content reveal a great deal about how the expedition’s writing labor was divided that winter.
Ordway’s Field Shorthand vs. the Captains’ Composed Prose
Ordway, writing in the brief, telegraphic style typical of his journal, compresses the entire incident into a single sentence:
evening the party returned Bratton came by land sick they brought Gibson in a blank* up from the canoe, he is very Sick, and low.
The detail of Gibson being carried “in a blank*” — likely a blanket used as an improvised litter — is one Ordway alone supplies at this granular level. He notes the moment of arrival at the fort itself, with Bratton walking and Gibson being lifted from a canoe.
Lewis and Clark, by contrast, produce nearly identical passages of polished narrative prose. Lewis writes that Bratton “arrived from the salt works and informed us that Sergt. Pryor and party were on their way with Gibson who is so much reduced that he cannot stand alone and that they are obliged to carry him in a litter.” Clark’s parallel sentence reports that Pryor’s party were “on their way with gibson in a litter. he is verry bad and much reduced with his present indisposition.” The captains’ versions explain the cause of the delay — sustained southwest winds prevented the canoe from ascending the creek — and offer a meteorological aside absent from Ordway: that these coastal gales pass largely unnoticed at the fort because of “the lofty and thickly timbered fir country which surrounds us.”
The Shared Medical Record
Where Lewis and Clark diverge from Ordway most strikingly is in their clinical attention. Both captains record the treatment regimen in matching language: diluted niter, sage tea taken plentifully, feet bathed in warm water, and thirty-five drops of laudanum administered at 9 P.M. A small but telling discrepancy appears in dosage. Lewis writes that they gave Gibson “broken dozes of diluted nitre,” while Clark records “double doses of diluted niter.” Whether this reflects a transcription divergence between the two journals or an actual editorial choice by Clark in copying from Lewis is unclear, but it is the kind of variance that recurs throughout the Fort Clatsop period, when Clark is known to have used Lewis’s entries as his template.
Both captains also offer the same diagnostic reasoning — that Gibson’s disorder “orriginated in a violent cold which he contracted in hunting and pursuing Elk and other game through the swams and marshes about the salt works” — and the same reassuring conclusion that he is not in danger. Ordway, who saw Gibson with his own eyes that evening, offers a bleaker impression: “very Sick, and low.”
The Quadruped Catalogue
The most dramatic divergence between Ordway and the captains is the long zoological essay that Lewis and Clark both append to the day’s entry. Lewis launches into a systematic enumeration of “The quadrupeds of this country from the Rocky Mountains to the pacific Ocean,” beginning with domestic animals (horse and dog) and then cataloguing the wild fauna: grizly bear, black bear, the several deer, elk, wolves, foxes, antelope, sheep, beaver, otters, and so on through to “polecat or skunk.” Clark reproduces the list in nearly the same order, with minor reshufflings — he places the elk earlier in his sequence and omits the panther from the initial list before restoring it later, while Lewis includes “spuck” (a term Clark drops). The two then turn to the horse and its geographic range across the Columbia plains.
This catalogue, occupying the bulk of the captains’ entries, has nothing to do with February 15 as a lived day. It is winter compilation work — encyclopedic synthesis being drafted under the rainy confinement of Fort Clatsop and parked in the journal under the current date. Ordway, who functioned as a working sergeant rather than a natural-history compiler, records only what he saw and did. Read together, the three entries show the expedition’s documentary apparatus operating on two parallel tracks: the immediate event log kept by the enlisted men, and the dual scientific-literary project undertaken jointly by the two captains.
