The journal entries for March 13, 1806 offer an unusually clear window into how the Corps of Discovery distributed its observational labor at Fort Clatsop. Four narrators — Patrick Gass, John Ordway, William Clark, and Meriwether Lewis — describe the same core events: the return of Drouillard, Joseph Field, and Frazer with two elk and two deer; the dispatch of Drouillard to the Clatsop village to bargain for canoes; Sergeant Pryor’s fruitless second search for the lost pirogue; and Collins’s incidental kill of two elk near the Netul. Yet each narrator inflects the day differently, and the divergences reveal the documentary architecture of the expedition.
Lewis and Clark: Parallel Texts
The most striking pattern is the near-verbatim correspondence between the Lewis and Clark entries. Both captains open with identical language about the hunters’ return and the visit of two Cathlahmahs, and both proceed through the day’s logistics in the same order. Compare Clark’s report of Pryor’s failed search:
Sergt. Pryor and a party made another Serch for the lost Canoe but was unsucksessfull; while engaged in Serching for the Canoe, Collins one of his party killed two Elk near the Netul below us.
with Lewis’s:
Sergt. Pryor and a party made another surch for the lost peroge but was unsuccessfull; while engaged in surching for the perogue Collins one of his party killed two Elk near the Netul below us.
The differences are revealing in their smallness. Clark writes “Canoe” where Lewis writes “peroge” — a vessel-class distinction Lewis evidently considered more precise. Clark’s spellings (“Serch,” “unsucksessfull”) diverge from Lewis’s, confirming that one captain copied from the other (or from a shared draft) while imposing his own orthography. The extended natural-history passage on the porpoise, skate, flounder, and common salmon is likewise transcribed almost word for word, with Lewis offering the slightly fuller observation that some elk retain their horns while others have already grown new ones “to the length of six inches” — a detail Clark omits.
What Gass and Ordway See That the Captains Miss
The enlisted-men’s journals operate on a different register. Ordway, ever the working sergeant, names himself in the action: he goes “with Six more of the party after the meat of an Elk,” and he reports that Collins, attached to Pryor’s search detail, “had killed two doe Elk and wounded 1 or 2 more.” The detail about wounded animals does not appear in the captains’ summaries, which round Collins’s tally to a clean two.
Gass, meanwhile, supplies the day’s most memorable original observation — one entirely absent from Lewis, Clark, and Ordway:
I this day took an account of the number of pairs of mockasons each man in the party had; and found the whole to be 338 pair. This stock was not provided without great labor, as the most of them are made of the skins of elk. Each man has also a sufficient quantity of patch-leather.
The figure — 338 pairs — is the kind of granular logistical fact that the captains’ journals, for all their length, simply do not capture. Gass’s count anticipates the overland return journey and demonstrates that the winter at Fort Clatsop was not merely an interval of waiting but a sustained manufacturing campaign. The carpenter-turned-sergeant brings a craftsman’s eye to material readiness, noting that elk-hide moccasins required “great labor” and that each man also carried patch-leather for repairs.
Registers and Audiences
The four entries together suggest distinct documentary purposes. Lewis’s journal is the most expansive, blending command-level logistics with extended ichthyology — the salmon description runs to morphological precision (“subulate and infleted” teeth, imbricated scales, the iris “of a silvery colour”). Clark’s entry tracks Lewis’s almost as a fair copy, with idiosyncratic spelling and the additional remark that this was “the only fair day for Sometime past” — a meteorological note tied to his taking of equal altitudes. Ordway provides a sergeant’s-eye operational log. Gass alone steps outside the day’s events to take inventory of the expedition’s footwear, treating the journal as a place to record what tomorrow will require.
Read together, the March 13 entries illustrate a familiar division within the expedition’s archive: the captains share natural-history observation through close textual collaboration, while the enlisted journalists preserve the practical and human details — wounded elk, moccasin counts, the names of who went where — that the official record tends to compress or omit.
