February 9, 1806 produced one of the more striking demonstrations of how unevenly the four Fort Clatsop journalists distributed their attention. The day’s events were modest: Collins and Wiser left to hunt, Drouillard returned with a single beaver, and six men were set to jerking meat under shelter. Yet the surviving entries range from a single laconic sentence to multi-paragraph botanical treatises, exposing the editorial hierarchy that governed the expedition’s record-keeping.
Compression and Expansion
Patrick Gass and John Ordway treat the day with extreme economy. Gass notes only that
the day we had sometimes sunshine, and sometimes showers of rain. One of our hunters caught a beaver.
Ordway is briefer still, recording the men
at jurking the meat. Several Showers of hail in course of the day.
Between them, the two sergeants supply weather, the beaver, and the meat-preservation labor — the operational skeleton of the day.
Lewis and Clark, by contrast, treat February 9 as an opportunity for natural-history work. Both captains open with nearly identical sentences on the hunters’ departure and Drouillard’s return, and both repeat the detail — absent from Gass and Ordway — that the beaver was the day’s only kill and that Drouillard had seen
one black bear, which is the only one which has been seen in this neighbourhood since our arrival.
The phrasing is so close that Clark is plainly copying from Lewis, a pattern well established in the Fort Clatsop journals.
Where the Captains Diverge
The fir tree of the tidal marshes provides the day’s most revealing contrast. Lewis describes a species he takes to be identical with his earlier “No. 5,” devoting attention chiefly to the cone:
the cone is 21/2 inches in length and 33/4 in it’s greatest circumpherence, which is near it’s base, and from which it tapers regularly to a point.
He sketches the imbricated scales and the thin leaf inserted into the pith.
Clark, however, departs from his usual practice of near-verbatim copying. He writes that
from examonation I find it a distinct species of fir
— an explicit correction of Lewis’s identification — and then produces a description considerably longer than Lewis’s own. Clark’s leaves are
acerose, 2/10 of an inch in width and 3/4 in length, they are firm Stiff and Somewhat accuminated, ending in a Short pointed hard tendril
, and he records the curious bicoloration in which
the under disk of these leaves… is of a dark glossy green, while the upper or opposit side is of a whiteish pale green; in this respect differing from almost all leaves.
He gives different cone dimensions (3½ by 3 inches, ovate rather than tapering), describes the winged seeds beneath each scale, and notes that cones emerge from older growth on the bough. This is one of the rarer instances in which Clark’s botanical entry is independently observed and substantively disagrees with Lewis’s.
On the black alder the two captains converge again, both recording the smooth, beech-like bark with
white coloured spreading spots or blotches
and the solitary rather than clumping habit of growth. Clark adds one detail Lewis omits: that the alder
casts its folage about the 1st of December.
The Jerking House
All four journalists touch on the meat-preservation work, but only Clark explains the logistical reason. Lewis writes simply that
fearing that our meat would spoil we set six men to jurking it.
Clark expands:
which they are obliged to perform in a house under shelter from the repeated rains.
The detail is small but characteristic — Clark, more often than Lewis, notes the practical accommodations forced on the party by the Pacific winter. Ordway’s mention of hail and Gass’s of alternating sun and showers corroborate the conditions that drove the work indoors.
The day thus illustrates the layered structure of the expedition’s record: the sergeants’ compressed operational logs, Lewis’s scientific descriptions composed in his characteristic register, and Clark’s habit of copying Lewis closely except where his own observation drives him to dissent. February 9 is a rare day on which that dissent is both explicit and detailed.
