The January 16, 1806 entries by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark are among the clearest examples in the expedition record of one captain copying directly from the other. The two men, confined to the damp cabins of Fort Clatsop, produced texts so closely aligned in structure, content, and even phrasing that the relationship between them is unmistakable. Yet the small divergences — in spelling, vocabulary, and detail — illuminate how each captain processed shared material in his own hand.
A Shared Argument for Waiting
Both narrators open with the same flat declaration. Clark writes that “This evening we finished cureing the meat. no occurrence worthey of relation took place to day,” while Lewis records, “This evening we finished curing the meat. no occurrence worthy of relation took place today.” The sentences are functionally identical; only Clark’s characteristic orthography (“cureing,” “worthey”) distinguishes them.
What follows is a carefully reasoned justification for remaining at Fort Clatsop until April 1st — a passage that reads less like a spontaneous diary entry than a position paper. The captains catalogue the obstacles: deep snow on the Columbian plains, scarcity of fuel, and above all the Rocky Mountains. Lewis frames the mountain barrier vividly:
we could not possibly pass that immence barrier of mountains on which the snows ly in winter to the debth in many places of 20 feet; in short the Indians inform us that they are impracticable untill about the 1st of June
Clark’s version is virtually word-for-word, though he writes “emence bearier” and “impassable” where Lewis writes “immence barrier” and “impracticable.” The substitution of “impassable” for “impracticable” is telling — Clark consistently chose plainer Anglo-Saxon vocabulary where Lewis reached for Latinate precision. The strategic conclusion is shared: departing April 1st will deliver them to the Rockies by June 1st, the earliest moment passage is feasible.
Ethnographic Detail and the Copying Process
The second half of both entries shifts to ethnography, describing Clatsop and Chinook fishing technology. Here the parallel becomes even more exact, suggesting Clark transcribed from Lewis’s draft (or vice versa) with minimal independent observation. Both list four implements — the straight net, the scooping or dipping net, the gig, and the hook and line — and both describe the materials as “silk grass or white cedar bark.”
The most interesting passage concerns the indigenous fishhook, which the captains describe geometrically. Lewis writes that the two bone pieces are “flattened and leveled off of their extremities near C. where they are firmly attatched together with sinues and covered with rosin.” Clark’s version reads:
these are flattened & beaveled off to their extremites at C, where they are firmley attached together and Covered with rozin
Two small but meaningful differences appear here. Clark writes “beaveled” (beveled) where Lewis writes “leveled” — one of these is likely a transcription slip, and “beveled” is almost certainly the intended word, given the context of shaping bone points. More substantively, Lewis specifies that the pieces are bound “with sinues,” a detail Clark omits entirely. Clark also adds a detail Lewis lacks: that the line “has a loop at D which it is anexed to a longer line and taken off at pleasure,” indicating a removable leader. Each captain, in copying, dropped or added a piece of information.
Register and the Question of Authorship
Scholars have long debated which captain authored the original drafts of the Fort Clatsop ethnographic passages. The January 16 entries support the prevailing view that Lewis was the principal observer-author of the natural history and ethnographic material during the winter, with Clark transcribing into his own journal — but not without modification. Clark’s hand is visible in his consistent simplification of Lewis’s diction (“impassable” for “impracticable,” “git” for “get”) and in his occasional addition of practical detail, as with the removable loop on the fishing line.
The day’s record thus offers a window into the collaborative documentary practice of the expedition. Confined by weather and committed to a strategic delay, the captains used these idle weeks to consolidate what they had learned about Clatsop and Chinook material culture. The doubled entry is not redundancy but redundancy with purpose: two manuscripts, two hands, hedging against the loss of either.
