February 2, 1806, was by every account an unremarkable Sunday at Fort Clatsop — moderate weather, a little snow, some hunters bringing in meat. Yet the four surviving entries for this date diverge so dramatically in length and content that they offer an unusually clean specimen of how rank, literacy, and inclination shaped each man’s journal practice during the long Pacific winter.
Four Registers, One Day
Patrick Gass, the carpenter-sergeant promoted after Floyd’s death, produces a workmanlike weather-and-labor note: the day grew “more moderate,” began to thaw, and finally to rain, while “Some of our men were engaged to day bringing in more meat.” John Ordway is even terser, recording only “noon cloudy & a little Snow, but not any worth mention.” Both sergeants treat the date as a logistical entry in a ledger.
The captains, by contrast, open with nearly identical language acknowledging the absence of incident — and then write at length anyway. Clark begins:
Not any accurrence to day worthy of notice; but all are pleased, that one month of the time which binds us to fort Clatsop, and which Seperates us from our friends, has now alapsed.
Lewis’s opening is virtually word-for-word the same, differing only in spelling (“occurrence,” “seperates,” “elapsed”). The shared sentiment — relief at the passage of a month — is rare in its emotional candor, and the parallel phrasing confirms what scholars have long observed: on quiet days at Fort Clatsop, the captains drafted together or copied freely from one another, then filled the remaining page with whatever ethnographic or natural-history material they had been compiling.
The Hand-Game and the Question of Authorship
What follows the shared opening is a description of a Chinookan gambling game — the widespread Native American hand-game in which a small object is concealed and the opposing party guesses which hand holds it. Here the directional flow of copying becomes visible. Lewis offers the fuller, more analytical account, describing the holder as “a kind of banker” who “plays for the time being against all the others in the room,” and explaining the transfer of the piece when his stake is exhausted. He also notes a second game involving bowling small pieces between upright sticks, candidly admitting:
the principals of the game I have not learn not understanding their language sufficiently to obtain an explanation.
Clark’s version compresses the same material, omits the banker metaphor, and skips the bowling game entirely. He does, however, retain Lewis’s comparative frame — the explicit comparison to the “Sosone’s & Minatare’s” version of the game, which the expedition had observed the previous summer among the Shoshone and Hidatsa. This comparative ethnography, linking Plains and Pacific Coast peoples through a shared gaming complex, is one of the more sophisticated anthropological observations the expedition produced. Both captains close with the same two generalizations: that Indian boys everywhere amuse themselves with bows and arrows, and that the peoples they have met are “excessive fond of their games of risk.”
The Elk-Hunting Dog
Both captains end with an identical detail that Gass and Ordway omit entirely:
The nativs of this neighbourhood have a Small Dog which they make usefull only in hunting the Elk.
This single sentence, slipped in after the long discussion of games, is the kind of compact ethnographic notice that distinguishes the captains’ journals from the sergeants’. Where Gass and Ordway record what the expedition did, Lewis and Clark increasingly use the Fort Clatsop winter to record what they have observed — converting forced idleness into systematic description of Chinookan material culture, language, fauna, and, on this day, recreation.
The pattern of February 2 — Lewis composing the fuller draft, Clark producing a condensed parallel version, the sergeants confining themselves to weather and labor — recurs throughout the Fort Clatsop winter. It is a useful reminder that the four expedition journals are not redundant witnesses to the same events, but documents written for different purposes by men of different rank, training, and curiosity.
