The first day of February 1806 at Fort Clatsop produced one of the clearest examples in the expedition record of how dramatically register and purpose diverged among the four journal-keepers. All four men note the same morning event — hunters departing up the Netul River — but the captains then pivot to a sustained technical description of Native canoes, while the enlisted sergeants close their entries in a single sentence.
The Same Morning, Four Lengths
Patrick Gass, who is himself one of the men sent out, records the day with characteristic brevity:
A number of the men went out to bring meat to the fort, and to take some to the salt works.
Gass does not mention his own leadership of the second party, nor the search for elk lost in the snow. John Ordway adds slightly more specificity, naming Gass and noting the division of labor:
Gass and five more of the party Set out a hunting, and 4 men set out with a hunter to help with the meat to the Salt works.
Ordway’s count of “five more” matches Clark’s “a party of five men,” and his “4 men” matches the captains’ “party of four men.” The numerical agreement suggests Ordway either heard the assignments at roll or compared notes with the captains’ clerks. Clark, by contrast, supplies the missing context — that the second party under Joseph Field was being sent to recover elk “which had been killed Some days since, and which Could not be found in Consequence of the Snow.” This detail, absent from both sergeants, reframes the day’s hunting not as routine provisioning but as salvage.
Lewis and Clark in Lockstep
The remainder of February 1 is given over, in both captains’ journals, to a long ethnographic set-piece on the canoes of the Lower Columbia peoples. The two passages run in near-perfect parallel — Clark’s text is plainly derived from Lewis’s, or both from a shared draft. Compare Lewis:
they are cut out of a solid stick of timber, the gunwals at the upper edge foald over outwards and are about 5/8 of an inch thick and 4 or five broad, and stand horrizontally forming a kind of rim to the canoe to prevent the water beating into it.
with Clark:
they are cut out of a solid Stick of timber, the gunnals at the upper edge fold over outwards and are about 5/8 of an inch thick and 4 or 5 broad, and Stand out nearly Horizontially forming a kind of rim to the Canoe to prevent the water beating into it.
The phrasing is identical save for orthography (“gunwals”/”gunnals,” “foald”/”fold”) and Clark’s small interpolation of “nearly” before “Horizontially.” This is the well-documented Fort Clatsop pattern in which Clark transcribes Lewis’s natural-history and ethnographic entries into his own journal, often with minor reorderings and additions.
Yet the copies are not identical, and the divergences are revealing. Where Lewis writes that the crossbars are “round sticks about half the size of a man’s arm” secured with “strings of waytape,” Clark substitutes a more precise measurement — “round Sticks about 1 inch and 1/2 diameter” — and identifies the lashing as “throngs of Cedar bark.” Clark also adds a fuller account of how the crossbars are fitted, with the stick “made Smaller than the other part of the Stick to prevent the cord Slipping off.” The carpenter’s eye is Clark’s. Lewis, meanwhile, counts “four forms of canoe” below the Grand Cataract; Clark counts “five.” Such small disagreements in a passage otherwise copied verbatim suggest the men were still revising their tally as Clark wrote.
Capacity, Ornament, and Joinery
Both captains marvel at the seaworthiness of vessels they had watched ride Pacific swells. Clark’s version of the awe is slightly stronger:
I have Seen the nativs near the Coast rideing waves in these Canoes in Safty and appearantly without Concern when I Should it impossible for any vessel of the Same Size to have lived or kept above water a minute.
Both note the largest canoes at over fifty feet, though Lewis estimates capacity at “8 to 10 thousand lbs.” and Clark at “8 to 12 thousand lbs.” Both register astonishment at the joinery of the carved bow and stern figures, which Lewis describes as “firmly united with tenants and motices without the assistance of a single spike of any kind” — a craftsman’s recognition that the Chinookan carvers had achieved with mortise-and-tenon what Euro-American shipwrights accomplished with iron.
The day thus illustrates a recurring Fort Clatsop dynamic: Gass and Ordway maintain the logistical skeleton of the expedition’s record — who hunted, who carried meat, who walked to the salt works — while Lewis and Clark, confined to quarters, transform the same date into an ethnographic essay. Without the sergeants’ entries, the elk in the snow would be the day’s whole story; without the captains’, the canoes would not be in the record at all.
