The journal entries for March 7, 1806, offer a useful demonstration of how narrator hierarchy and personal interest shaped the documentary record at Fort Clatsop. All four diarists record the same skeletal facts — high wind, hail and rain, hunters returning at sunset with a single elk — but the entries fan out from there into strikingly different registers. Patrick Gass and John Ordway compress the day into a few lines; William Clark and Meriwether Lewis produce paragraphs of medical and ornithological detail that overlap closely in some passages and diverge entirely in others.
The Hunt and the Captains’ Shared Draft
Ordway, brief as usual, notes that “Sergt Gass and one man went at repairing the canoes” before the hunters returned at evening. Gass himself omits the canoe work and instead seizes on a domestic hardship the captains pass over entirely:
Among our other difficulties we now experience the want of tobacco, and out of 33 persons composing our party, there are but 7 who do not make use of it: we use crab-tree bark as a substitute.
This is the kind of enlisted-man’s observation that distinguishes Gass throughout the expedition. Neither captain mentions the tobacco shortage on this date, though it clearly affected most of the party. Gass’s quantitative precision — 33 persons, 7 abstainers — also reflects his characteristic interest in headcounts and rations.
Clark and Lewis, by contrast, produce nearly identical opening paragraphs. Compare Clark’s “The wind was So high that Comowol did not leave us untill late this evening. Drewyer & Labiesh returned at Sunset haveing killed one Elk only” with Lewis’s “The wind was so high that Comowol did not leave us untill late this evening. Labuish and Drewyer returned at sunset having killed one Elk only.” The phrasing is so close that one is plainly copying the other or both are working from a shared draft. The medical treatment of Bratton — flannel shirt, flannel bandage, a liniment of “Sperits of wine, camphire, Sastile Soap, and a little laudinum” (Clark) or “sperits of wine, camphor, castile soap and a little laudinum” (Lewis) — appears in both with only spelling variants. Clark adds a small detail Lewis omits: that he “bathed his feet to restore circulation.”
Where the Captains Diverge: Natural History
The entries part ways once the day’s events are recorded. Clark turns to loons, distinguishing the familiar speckled loon from a smaller species first encountered at the Great Falls of the Columbia, with a “long, Slender and white in front” neck and an inability to fly. He closes with a measurement supplied by Shields, Reubin Field, and Frazier: a fir tree “37 feet around” and “abt 280 feet high.”
Lewis, on the same date, mounts a much more ambitious natural-history catalogue. He treats herons (“the large blue and brown herons, or Crams as they are usually called in the U States”), the fishing hawk, the blue crested kingfisher, four species of gull, and the cormorant. The gull descriptions are particularly methodical, ranked by size and distinguished by plumage and beak structure:
4th a white gull about the size of the second with a remarkable beak; adjoining the head and at the base of the uper Chap there is an elivated orning of the same substance with the beak which forms the nostrils.
Lewis also notes geographic range — the large grey gull reaches “as high as the entrance of the Kooskooske,” while cormorants were first met “on the Kooskooske at the entrance of Chopunnish river” and increased in number downstream. This is the comparative method Lewis applies repeatedly during the Fort Clatsop winter: anchoring Pacific species against Atlantic counterparts familiar to his expected readership.
Patterns of Attention
The day’s four entries illustrate a consistent division of labor. Ordway records the bare operational facts. Gass adds the perspective of the rank and file — what the men lacked, what substitutes they improvised. Clark and Lewis share a common narrative spine for events involving command decisions (Comowol’s departure, Bratton’s treatment, the hunters’ report), but each captain pursues his own zoological interests in parallel: Clark on loons and a measured tree, Lewis on herons, hawks, gulls, and cormorants. That Clark’s loon passage and Lewis’s gull catalogue do not overlap suggests the captains were dividing the natural-history workload rather than duplicating it, even as they kept their event narratives nearly synchronized.
