The journals of February 11, 1806 offer a striking case study in how four men sharing the same fort, the same weather, and the same morning’s events could produce four radically different documentary records. Patrick Gass, John Ordway, William Clark, and Meriwether Lewis all note the dispatch of hunting and retrieval parties from Fort Clatsop, but the entries quickly diverge along lines of literary register, scientific ambition, and personal experience.
The Same Morning, Four Registers
Ordway’s entry is the most compressed, recording only that a canoe went “round to the Salt works after the Sick men” and that “three men went out to hunt the after part of the day rainy.” His sergeant’s shorthand strips the day to bare logistics. Clark and Lewis, by contrast, open with nearly identical sentences naming the departing parties — a textual pattern repeated throughout the Fort Clatsop winter, where the two captains shared notes and frequently mirrored each other’s prose.
Compare Clark’s opening:
This Morning Serjt. Gass R. Field and J. Thompson passed the Netul opposit to us on a hunting expedition. Sent Serjeant Natl. Pryor with 4 men in a Canoe to bring gibson to the Fort.
With Lewis’s:
This morning Sergt. Gass Reubin Fields and Thompson passed the Netul opposite to us on a hunting expedition. sent Sergt Pryor with a party of four men to bring Gibson to the fort.
The near-verbatim opening reflects the well-documented practice in which one captain’s draft seeded the other’s. Yet the entries diverge meaningfully thereafter, and the divergences reveal what each man considered worth elaborating.
Gass in the Field, the Captains at the Desk
One of the most revealing features of the day’s record is that Gass — named in both captains’ entries as departing on the hunt — does not write a same-day entry at all. His journal compresses February 11 through the 17th into a single retrospective passage, and in doing so preserves an experience entirely absent from the captains’ fort-bound accounts:
During one of the most disagreeable nights, myself and another lay out in our shirts and overalls, with only one elk skin to defend us from a violent night’s rain. We had started a gang of elk, and in order to be light in the pursuit left our clothes where the first was killed, and could not get back before dark. Our shirts and overalls being all of leather made it the more disagreeable.
Gass’s sergeant-narrator voice supplies what the captains’ journals cannot: the bodily cost of the hunt that fed the fort. The detail of leather clothing soaked through in cold rain — uncomfortable precisely because the material would not breathe or dry — is the kind of granular field knowledge that rarely surfaces in Lewis’s or Clark’s entries during this winter, when the captains spent most of their days indoors writing.
Two Botanists Splitting the Specimen Drawer
Where Gass narrates the hunt, Clark and Lewis turn to natural history. Both describe the same thorny shrub with “peteolate, Spreading plain crenate and Somewhat woolly leaf like the rose raspberry” — again with shared phrasing — but their entries then take different paths.
Clark devotes his attention to a green-stemmed bramble he had “first discovered” near the entrance of the Sandy (“quick Sand”) River, noting how it “grows So abundantly in the furtile Vally of Columbia and on the Islands in that part of the river, that the Countrey near the river is almost impenitrable in maney places.” His description is geographically anchored, recalling the expedition’s westward passage and emphasizing the plant’s practical implications for travel — a characteristic Clark concern.
Lewis, meanwhile, pivots to comparative botany, identifying one shrub as “precisely the same with that in Virginia some times called the quillwood” and devoting a long passage to what he believes is another variety of salal, correcting his own earlier January 26 description. His measurements are precise to a fraction — “the petiole 1/40 of an inch long” — and he attends to leaf morphology with terminology (“convex, somewhat revolute, serrate”) that signals his Linnaean ambitions.
The captains thus appear to have divided their botanical labor: Clark cataloging the impassable green briar of the Columbia bottoms, Lewis refining his earlier specimen descriptions and reaching for Atlantic comparisons. Both men note that Native peoples eat the berries of these plants but “seldom collect it in such quantities as to dry it for winter uce” — an ethnobotanical observation phrased almost identically and likely shared between them in conversation before either committed it to paper.
What Each Voice Preserves
Read together, the four entries demonstrate the complementary value of the expedition’s multi-narrator record. Ordway furnishes the skeletal log. Gass, writing retrospectively, supplies the embodied texture of the hunt. Clark and Lewis, sharing source material, split a botanical project between them — Clark grounding it in remembered geography, Lewis in comparative taxonomy. No single journal of February 11 would tell the day; only the four together approach it.
