The events of January 24, 1806 at Fort Clatsop were straightforward: George Drouillard and Jean-Baptiste Lepage returned by canoe with the Clatsop chief Coboway (Comowooll) and several Clatsop men, bringing the meat of elk and deer killed near Point Adams. The Clatsops had helped pack the carcasses overland to where canoes could be loaded. They stayed at the fort overnight. Yet the four surviving accounts of this day differ so dramatically in scope and emphasis that they nearly read as accounts of different days.
Compression and Expansion
Sergeant Patrick Gass produces the briefest entry — five sentences encompassing weather, the hunters’ return, and an evening detail the officers omit entirely. Gass alone notes that the visiting Clatsops were barefooted notwithstanding the snow on the ground
, and that because the evening was so bad we permitted them to stay in the fort all night.
Clark, writing far more expansively, will echo the barefoot observation in his closing line — their feet legs & every other part exposed to the frost Snow & ice &c.
— but neither captain mentions the permission to lodge inside, a small administrative fact that fell within Gass’s sergeant-of-the-guard awareness.
John Ordway’s entry is similarly economical but supplies the precise hunting tally that Lewis and Clark fold into a more diplomatic summary. Ordway records that Drewyer had killed 4 Elk 2 of the other hunters killed 2 deer
, and notes practically that the meat came in the Indians’ canoe except what they gave them for packing &C.
Lewis specifies the price of that packing — the flesh of one other Elk which they killed and three Elk’s skins
— and adds the distance the Clatsops carried the meat on their backs.
Lewis and Clark in Parallel
The captains’ entries for January 24 demonstrate their well-documented practice of mutual copying, with Clark working from Lewis’s draft. The opening sentences are nearly identical, but small divergences reveal each man’s hand. Lewis writes that the Indians carried the meat about six miles
; Clark renders the same passage as near 4 miles
— a discrepancy that has long puzzled editors. Clark’s spelling — exolted
, medison
, Clapsots
— diverges from Lewis’s more polished orthography, but the rhetorical structure is shared verbatim:
this may probably be of service to us, as it will deter them from any acts of hostility if they have ever meditated any such.
Both captains seize on the same incident — the Clatsops witnessing Drouillard’s marksmanship — as a piece of strategic theater. Lewis adds that the air gun astonishes them very much, they cannot comprehend it’s shooting so often and without powder; and think that it is great medicine which comprehends every thing that is to them incomprehensible.
Clark reproduces the line almost word for word. The captains are constructing, in tandem, a narrative of deterrence: native respect for American firearms as a hedge against attack during the long, vulnerable winter.
Lewis Alone: The Ethnobotanical Digression
Where Clark closes his entry with the barefoot observation, Lewis keeps writing — and writes another full page on Chinookan plant foods that has no counterpart in any other narrator’s journal for this date. He describes the local liquorice and the technique of roasting it in the embers
and pounding it with a small stick in order to make it seperate more readily from the strong liggament which forms the center of the root.
He compares its flavor to the sweet pittaitoe
, evaluates a bitter boiled root used with train oil, describes thistle root prepared to the consistency of sagamity or indian mush
, and identifies wapato (the bulb of the Sagitifolia or common arrow head
) as the most valuable root in regional trade, growing for some seventy miles along the Columbia above the Sandy River.
This digression — botanical, culinary, and economic — is characteristic of Lewis’s role as the expedition’s principal natural historian. Gass, Ordway, and Clark all register the day as a hunting return; Lewis treats it additionally as an occasion for synthesizing weeks of observation about Clatsop subsistence. Read together, the four entries show the expedition’s documentary division of labor in microcosm: Gass attends to the human and disciplinary detail, Ordway to numbers and logistics, Clark to the diplomatic frame, and Lewis to the wider ethnographic and scientific record.
