The entry for February 14, 1806 offers one of the clearest demonstrations in the Fort Clatsop journals of how the expedition’s three narrators present operated at radically different registers. John Ordway records a single clause about the weather. William Clark drafts a sweeping geographic argument. Meriwether Lewis transcribes Clark’s argument almost word for word, with a handful of revisions that quietly assert editorial authority. Read together, the three entries show the expedition’s documentary machinery at work: observation, synthesis, and circulation among the captains’ shared notebooks.
Ordway’s Weather, Clark’s Map
Ordway’s full entry reads simply:
rain through the course of the day.
Brevity of this kind is characteristic of Ordway’s Fort Clatsop winter, when the sergeant frequently confined himself to meteorological notice. The contrast with Clark could hardly be sharper. Clark opens with the same domestic concerns Lewis will echo — anxiety over the sick men at the salt works, the unexplained delay of Sergeant Pryor’s party, and Drouillard’s beaver, which the captains pronounced “a great delecessey” — before turning to the day’s principal achievement:
I compleated a map of the Countrey through which we have been passing from the Mississippi at the Mouth of Missouri to this place.
Clark then catalogues the rivers laid down “by celestial observations and Survey” — the Missouri, Jefferson’s, the S. E. branch of the Columbia (which he calls “Lewis’s river”), the Kooskooske, the Columbia itself, and a portion of Clark’s river. The remainder of the entry advances a substantive geographic claim: that the route the expedition has traveled is “the most practicable and navigable passage across the Continent of North America,” with the qualification that the stretch from the Falls of the Missouri to Traveler’s Rest Creek would be better made overland than by following the Missouri’s “crooked laborious” course.
Lewis as Editor: Silent Revisions
Lewis’s entry reproduces Clark’s geographic essay so closely that the two must be read as a single composition transmitted between notebooks. Yet Lewis’s revisions are revealing. Where Clark dates his completion of the map to February 14 itself, Lewis backdates it: “on the 11th inst. Capt Clark completed a map of the country through which we have been passing from Fort Mandan to this place.” Lewis also shortens the map’s eastern terminus from “the Mississippi at the Mouth of Missouri” to “Fort Mandan,” a more conservative claim consistent with the new survey work begun in spring 1805.
Lewis further substitutes “Flathead river” for Clark’s preferred “Clark’s river” throughout — a small but consistent terminological choice. He revises Clark’s distances: where Clark gives the Missouri above the Falls as “521 miles” and the land savings as “At. 600 miles,” Lewis writes “420 miles” and “500 miles,” reckoning instead from “the entrance of Dearborn’s River.” These are not casual differences. Lewis is recalculating the comparison so that it begins from a more defensible upstream point, tightening the argument’s geographic precision.
The Shape of a Shared Argument
The structural identity of the two captains’ entries — same opening anxieties, same beaver feast, same conclusion about the Flathead/Clark’s river running north along the mountains before joining the Columbia, same skepticism toward the Columbia’s navigability between the S. E. fork and the Flathead — confirms that one journal was written with the other open before its author. The pattern is familiar from other Fort Clatsop entries, but here the stakes are unusually high: the captains are jointly formulating the expedition’s headline geographic finding for Jefferson.
Both men note the same confirming evidence: the absence of salmon in the Flathead river, contrasted with their presence in the S. E. branch of the Columbia, taken as corroboration of native testimony that falls and rapids block the Flathead’s passage through the Rocky Mountains. Clark attributes the information to “the So so nee or Snake Indians, and the Flatheads of the Columbia west of the rocky mountains”; Lewis compresses this to “the Indians.” The compression is typical of Lewis’s editorial hand — smoother prose, fewer ethnographic specifics, a more declarative tone.
Ordway, meanwhile, would have had no access to the maps spread across the captains’ table. His one-line entry is not a failure of attention but a reflection of role: the sergeants’ journals tracked the camp’s daily weather and labor, while the captains alone authored the expedition’s geographic conclusions. The February 14 entries, set side by side, document both that division of labor and the close collaborative drafting by which Lewis and Clark produced what would become the principal cartographic legacy of their journey.
