The events of January 5, 1806 at Fort Clatsop offer one of the clearest windows in the expedition record into how the four principal journal-keepers shaped shared experience into prose. Privates Willard and Wiser returned from the salt camp at 5 P.M., bringing news of a successful establishment on the coast, a gallon specimen of salt, and blubber from a whale that had washed ashore near Killamuck lodges. Lewis, Clark, Ordway, and Gass each describe a slice of this day, but their accounts diverge in revealing ways.
Captains in Parallel: A Study in Co-Authorship
The most striking feature of the January 5 record is the near-verbatim correspondence between the entries of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark. Both open with the same clause — “At 5 P.M. Willard and Wiser returned, they had not been lost as we expected/apprehended” — and proceed through the same sequence: the fifth-day establishment of the salt camp, the friendliness of the Clatsop and Killamuck Indians, the description of the blubber, the cooking of it, and the report on salt yield.
Clark describes the blubber as resembling “the beaver in flavour.” Lewis expands this to “the beaver or the dog in flavour” and adds an aside: “it may appear somewhat extraordinary tho it is a fact that the flesh of the beaver and dog possess a very great affinity in point of flavour.” This kind of digressive natural-history commentary is characteristic of Lewis and absent from Clark’s more compressed version.
The entries converge again, almost word for word, in their shared philosophical close:
I have learned to think that if the Cord be Sufficiently Strong which binds the Soul and boddy together, it does not So much matter about the materials which Compose it. (Clark)
I have learned to think that if the chord be sufficiently strong, which binds the soul and boddy together, it dose not so much matter about the materials which compose it. (Lewis)
Yet the framing differs in a telling way. Clark presents the sentiment as his own confession of indifference toward salt: “as to my Self I care but little whether I have any with my meat or not.” Lewis, in contrast, attributes the indifference to Clark while distancing himself: “my friend Capt. Clark declares it to be a mear matter of indifference with him whether he uses it or not; for myself I must confess I felt a considerable inconvenience from the want of it.” The shared closing aphorism, then, is Clark’s in origin — Lewis quotes his companion’s philosophy while gently dissenting from its application. The textual relationship suggests one journal was drafted with the other open beside it, a pattern scholars have long noted for the Fort Clatsop winter.
Ordway’s Compression and Gass’s Adventure
Sergeant John Ordway covers the same arrival but in radically compressed form. He omits the salt-camp narrative, the philosophical reflection, and the ethnographic detail entirely, recording instead the practical particulars a quartermaster might track:
2 men came from the Salt Camp with about 2 gallons of Salt, they had killed three Elk and one Deer, they informed us that the Savages brought loads of the whail that they had informed us of. our men bought som of the meat from them which was good.
Ordway notes a transaction the captains do not mention — that men at the fort purchased whale meat from Indians who arrived with “loads” of it — and reports two gallons of salt rather than the captains’ one. His register is functional, oriented toward provisions and exchange.
Sergeant Patrick Gass, meanwhile, is not at the fort at all. His January 5 entry belongs to a separate narrative thread: a journey involving a creek crossing on an undersized raft.
I however, notwithstanding the cold, stript and swam to the raft, brought it over and then crossed on it in safety; when we pursued our journey, and in a short time came to some Indian camps on the seashore.
Gass’s account is the only first-person physical adventure on the date, and it reminds the reader that the expedition’s journal-keepers were dispersed across the landscape even when the captains were stationary.
What Each Narrator Preserves
Read together, the four entries demonstrate how the expedition’s documentary record is built from overlapping but non-redundant witnesses. Lewis preserves comparative natural history and personal reflection; Clark preserves the originating aphorism and a slightly drier prose. Ordway preserves the commercial micro-history of meat purchased from visiting Indians. Gass preserves the embodied experience of a man stripping in winter to retrieve a raft. Only by reading across all four does the full texture of January 5, 1806 emerge — a day on which salt, whale blubber, and a half-submerged philosophy of the body all entered the expedition’s record at once.
