The journal entries for January 30, 1806 from Fort Clatsop offer a striking demonstration of how the expedition’s three narrators on this date — John Ordway, William Clark, and Meriwether Lewis — divided observational labor in the long Pacific winter. Ordway’s entry is a single weather note; Lewis and Clark each produce extended passages whose openings are nearly word-for-word identical, then diverge into separate areas of inquiry. The result is a useful window into the captains’ collaborative drafting and the different ethnographic and botanical priorities each pursued.
Parallel Openings: A Shared Source Text
Ordway, terse as often during the Fort Clatsop winter, records only that snow or rain “fell this morning, the evening clear and cold.” By contrast, Lewis and Clark begin with sentences so closely matched that one is plainly copying or both are working from a common draft. Lewis writes:
Nothing transpired today worthy of notice. we are agreeably disappointed in our fuel which is altogether green pine. we had supposed that it burn but illy, but we have found that by spliting it that it burns very well.
Clark’s version is essentially the same, with minor orthographic variants (“disapointed,” “badly” in place of “but illy,” “Spliting”):
Nothing transpired to day worthey of notice. we are agreeably disapointed in our fuel which is altogether green pine. we had Supposed that it burned badly, but we have found by Spliting it burns very well.
The same pattern continues into the next paragraph on Clatsop dress, where both captains note that the natives “never wear leggins or mockersons” because of the mild, wet climate. The convergence here is consistent with what scholars have long observed about the Fort Clatsop journals: Lewis and Clark frequently shared a working draft, with Clark transcribing Lewis’s natural-history and ethnographic prose into his own notebook, sometimes lightly editing as he copied. Ordway, working independently and with a different journalistic register, shows no trace of this shared text.
Diverging Interests: Botany versus Material Culture
After the shared opening, the two captains’ entries split decisively. Clark devotes the bulk of his entry to a meticulous botanical description of the sac-a-commis (bearberry, Arctostaphylos uva-ursi), tracing its habitat, root structure, bark, leaves, and fruit. He notes its range from “the Western Side of the Rocky mountains” to “Lake Winnipic,” reports its use by native peoples, and offers a personal aesthetic verdict:
the nativs on the West side of the Rocky mountains who can precure this berry invariably use it; to me it is a very tasteless and insipid frute.
The description proceeds with the careful vocabulary of late-eighteenth-century natural history — “procumbent,” “radicles,” “pericarp,” “spheroid” — and breaks off mid-sentence on the structure of the berry’s outer coat. This is the kind of structured botanical entry usually associated with Lewis, and its appearance under Clark’s hand on this date is itself notable: Clark is either drafting independently or transcribing a Lewis passage that Lewis himself did not enter into his own notebook for the day.
Lewis, for his part, turns from dress to two specific items of Clatsop material culture that Clark passes over entirely. He describes the conic, brimless rain hat:
these hats are made of the bark of cedar and beargrass wrought with the fingers so closely that it casts the rain most effectually… on these hats they work various figures of different colours… these figures are faint representations of whales the canoes and the harpoonneers striking them.
He then catalogs a distinctive double-edged, double-pointed dagger with a central handle and blades “of unequal lengths, the longest usually from 9 to ten inches and the shorter one from four to five,” noting how it is habitually concealed beneath the robe in the presence of strangers and secured to the hand by “a small loop of a strong twine.” Lewis even gestures toward an accompanying sketch (“this is somewhat the form of the knife”), a reminder that his journal practice integrated illustration with prose in a way Clark’s, on this date, does not.
Three Registers, One Day
Read together, the three entries display three distinct documentary registers from a single fort on a single uneventful day. Ordway supplies the meteorological baseline. Clark and Lewis share a drafted ethnographic preamble and then specialize: Clark into systematic botany of a regionally important food plant, Lewis into close description of Clatsop hats and weapons, including details — the whaling iconography, the concealed dagger, the thumb-loop — that no other narrator on this date records. The day’s apparent dullness (“Nothing transpired… worthy of notice”) becomes, in the captains’ hands, an occasion for the sustained descriptive work that gives the Fort Clatsop winter much of its scientific value.
