The entries for January 31, 1806, offer an unusually clean experiment in cross-narrator comparison. All four diarists — Patrick Gass, John Ordway, William Clark, and Meriwether Lewis — were lodged together at Fort Clatsop, witnessed the same events, and yet produced texts that differ radically in length, register, and emphasis. The day held three discrete incidents: a hunting party turned back by river ice, the arrival of Joseph Fields with news of two elk killed near the salt works, and the delivery to the captains of a dead bird found near the fort by Toussaint Charbonneau. Each narrator selects, compresses, or expands these events according to his role in the expedition’s documentary economy.
The Hunting Party and the Salt-Works Elk
Gass, who actually led the aborted hunt, gives the briefest account. He writes that the party “went up the small river in a canoe to hunt; but after we had gone a mile, we were stopped by the ice and had to return to the fort.” His perspective is that of a participant measuring distance in miles traveled before turnabout. Ordway, working from camp gossip rather than personal experience, names the leader and inflates the company:
Gass and Six men set out a hunting took a canoe found Ice in the River So that they turned back, in the evening one of the hunters returned from the Salt Camps he had killed two Elk which is the 1st that has been killed by the Salt makers a long time.
Ordway’s detail that this was “the 1st that has been killed by the Salt makers a long time” is a piece of communal knowledge absent from the captains’ versions — a sergeant’s awareness of the hunger pressure on the salt-making detachment. Notably, Gass himself does not mention that the unnamed hunter killed two elk; he records only “an elk,” suggesting either a hasty entry or that the second carcass was not yet confirmed when he wrote.
Clark and Lewis, by contrast, name the hunter as Joseph Fields and reconstruct the salt-camp story in narrative form, specifying that Fields had hunted with Gibson and Willard “for the last four days” (Clark) or “five days” (Lewis) and that the elk lay “about six miles distant from this place and about 8 from the salt works.” The captains’ near-identical wording confirms what scholars have long observed about this stretch of the journals: Clark and Lewis were drafting in close consultation, with one almost certainly copying or paraphrasing the other. The minor discrepancies — “four” versus “five” days, “Sent a party of Eight men” versus “Sent a party of eight men up the river” — are precisely the sort of small slippages that occur in serial transcription rather than independent composition.
McNeal’s Pox and Charbonneau’s Bird
Two further events appear only in the captains’ journals. Both Clark and Lewis record, in matched phrasing, that they “discovered that McNeal had the pox, gave him medicine” — a medical note that Gass and Ordway either did not know or chose not to commit to paper. The discretion is conspicuous: venereal disease in the corps was a captains’ problem, handled within the officer caste.
The day’s centerpiece, however, is the dead bird Charbonneau brought to the fort. Clark and Lewis devote nearly their entire entries to a meticulous physical description — wingspan of “one foot 3/4 inches” (Clark) or “one foot 31/4 Inches” (Lewis), eleven tail feathers, a “smoth, black, convex and cultrated” beak, and a “gorget” of black across the breast above a throat and belly of “fine Yellowish brick red.” Lewis explicitly links the specimen to a sighting “on the morning of the 20th of September last” in the Rocky Mountains; Clark writes only that he had seen the bird “at severl different times,” which suggests Lewis is the originating naturalist and Clark the secondary recorder. The bird — almost certainly Clark’s nutcracker or, more probably given the markings, a varied thrush — is the kind of specimen Lewis lived to describe, and the parallel passages are a small monument to the captains’ division of labor: Lewis observes and dictates the natural-history register; Clark transcribes with light orthographic variation (“reconized” for “recognized,” “troop” for “croop”).
Register and the Hierarchy of Witness
Read together, the four entries map a hierarchy of attention. Gass writes as a working sergeant: terse, participatory, indifferent to taxonomy. Ordway adds the camp’s collective memory of hunger at the salt works. Clark and Lewis, sharing both authority and source material, produce the official scientific and administrative record — the version that would feed the published account. The bird that Charbonneau picked up off the ground enters history only because two of the four men present believed such a thing worth a page of prose.
