The entries for January 29, 1806, offer an unusually clear demonstration of how the four journal-keepers at Fort Clatsop divided the labor of observation. The captains, confined to quarters and complaining of monotonous food, turned outward toward ethnography and natural history; the enlisted men kept their pens close to the immediate facts of weather and firewood. Read together, the four entries form a stratified record in which the same idle winter day produces a single sentence from one narrator and pages of detailed description from another.
The Sergeants’ Brevity
Patrick Gass disposes of the day in a clause, noting only that the weather “continued clear throughout” before moving immediately to the 30th. John Ordway is scarcely more expansive, recording that the men “do nothing except git wood for our fires & C.” Both sergeants treat January 29 as unremarkable — a day defined by what did not happen. Their entries together occupy fewer than thirty words and confirm a pattern visible throughout the Fort Clatsop winter: the enlisted journalists tracked labor and weather, the practical rhythm of garrison life, and rarely ventured into the descriptive cataloguing that occupied the captains.
Ordway’s mention of wood-gathering provides a useful counterweight to the captains’ silence on daily fatigue duty. Neither Lewis nor Clark mentions the firewood detail, though it was clearly the day’s principal activity for most of the party. The contrast suggests how readily the officers’ journals can give a misleading impression of leisure — the captains were free to write botany because other men were splitting cedar.
Lewis and Clark: Shared Opening, Diverging Subjects
The captains’ entries begin almost identically. Clark writes:
Nothing worthey of notice occured to day. our fare is the flesh of lean Elk boiled with pure water and a little Salt. the whale blubber which we have used very Spearingly is now exhosted.
Lewis’s version is nearly word-for-word:
Nothing worthy of notice occurred today. our fare is the flesh of lean elk boiled with pure water, and a little salt. the whale blubber which we have used very sparingly is now exhausted.
This is one of the clearest instances of the well-documented copying relationship between the two captains’ journals during the Fort Clatsop winter. The shared paragraph continues through the reflection on appetite, with Clark confessing he does “not feel Strong, but enjoy tolerable health” while Lewis upgrades his own constitution to “the most perfect health.” The discrepancy is small but characteristic: Clark, throughout the winter, more readily admits physical weakness, while Lewis tends toward a more confident self-assessment. Whether one man drafted the passage and the other transcribed with light edits, or whether they composed in conference, the parallel text is unmistakable.
After this shared opening, however, the two men part company. Clark turns to ethnography, describing the conical Columbia River hats woven of “the bark of Cedar and beargrass” and decorated with “faint representations of the whales, the Canoes, and the harpooners Strikeing them.” He then sketches the distinctive double-edged, double-pointed dagger carried by the Chinookan men, noting that they keep it habitually “in the hand, Sometimes exposed, when in Company with Strangers under their Robes” — a detail that quietly registers the captains’ continuing wariness about armed visitors. Clark even includes a small loop of twine on the handle “through which they Sometimes they incert the thumb in order to prevent it being wrested from their hand,” the kind of functional detail that betrays close inspection of an actual specimen.
Lewis the Botanist
Lewis, by contrast, devotes his post-shared paragraph to a meticulous description of Sac a commis (bearberry, Arctostaphylos uva-ursi). He covers habitat (“high dry situations, and invariably in a piney country”), the procumbent stems, the bark in “several thin layers of a smoth thin brittle substance,” the oval and “obtusely pointed” leaves, and the spheroidal berry whose “inner part consists of a dry mealy powder of a yellowish white colour.” The passage reads like a draft for a formal botanical description and confirms Lewis’s role as the expedition’s principal naturalist. He even pauses for a personal verdict: “to me it is a very tasteless and insippid fruit.”
The division of subject matter on this single day — Clark on material culture, Lewis on plants — is consistent with the broader pattern of the Fort Clatsop winter, during which the two captains appear to have informally allocated the major descriptive projects between them. Where their journals overlap, as in the opening paragraph, the texts are nearly twins; where they diverge, each man pursues the line of inquiry that suits his temperament. Set beside Gass’s weather line and Ordway’s wood detail, the captains’ parallel labor reveals the layered authorship that gives the expedition’s record its unusual depth.
