February 21, 1806 brought the formal closure of the salt-making operation on the Pacific coast and a return of the detached party to Fort Clatsop. Four narrators record the day, and their entries reveal the now-familiar hierarchy of the winter quarters journals: the captains write polished, parallel accounts; the enlisted men supply the embodied detail of what the weather actually felt like.
The Salt Camp Returns: Ordway’s Body, Gass’s Brevity
Patrick Gass, characteristically terse, condenses the entire march into a single weather note, recording only that the returning party “had a very unpleasant day, as it rained hard during the whole of it.” John Ordway, who actually led that party, gives the fullest account of the slog. He describes taking “an Indian canoe” across the river, then being overtaken by a storm so violent that the wind prevented a second canoe crossing:
set in to Storming & rained verry hard & the wind blew so high that we could not cross the creek in a canoe and waided across and got to the Fort about half past 12 oClock. much fatigued and I am at this time verry Sick, and wet to my Skins waiding the Slashes and marshes
Ordway’s entry is one of the more vivid first-person accounts of physical suffering in the winter journals. The captains, by contrast, register his return as a logistical fact. Clark notes simply that “Sergt. Ordway returned with the party from the Salt Camp which we have now avacuated,” and Lewis records the same in nearly identical language. Neither captain mentions the storm that nearly stranded the men or Ordway’s reported sickness on arrival—a striking example of how the captains’ command-level perspective filters out the lived texture that Ordway and Gass preserve.
Lewis and Clark in Parallel
The Clark and Lewis entries for February 21 are among the clearest examples in the corpus of one captain copying the other. The opening sentences are virtually word-for-word, with Clark writing that the Clatsop visitors “are great begers; Capt Lewis gave one of them a fiew nedles,” while Lewis writes that they “are great begers; I gave one of them a few nedles.” The pronoun shift—”Capt Lewis” to “I”—is the tell: Clark is working from Lewis’s draft (or shared notes) and converting first person to third. The medical, hunting, and salt-inventory paragraphs follow the same pattern, with Clark reporting that Willard received “a dose of Scots pills; they opperated very well,” while Lewis adds the detail Clark omits, that Bratton also received a dose “and on the latter they (lid not.”
The salt accounting is identical in both: roughly 20 gallons total, with 12 gallons secured in “2 Small iron bound Kegs” reserved for the return voyage. This is the practical bottom line of the months-long salt-making enterprise that occupied a detached party on the coast through January and February.
Lewis the Naturalist Diverges
Where Clark stops after a brief comparative note on wolves, Lewis pushes on into a substantial natural-history passage that has no counterpart in the other journals. He describes the “tyger Cat”—almost certainly the bobcat or lynx—with the precision of a trained observer, noting fur color, the “pensil of fine, streight, black hair” at the ear tips, and the ethnographic detail that “the natives in this quarter make great use of the skins of this Cat to form the robes which they wear; four skins is the compliment usuly employed in each robe.”
He then takes up the “Black fox, or as they most frequently called in the neighbourhood of Detroit, Fisher,” objecting to the common name on empirical grounds:
how this animal obtained the name of fisher I know not, but certain it is, that the name is not appropriate, as it dose not prey on fish or seek it as a prey.
This impulse to correct vernacular nomenclature against observed behavior is distinctively Lewis. Clark mentions the same animal only glancingly—”Drewyer Saw a fisher but it escaped from him”—using the very name Lewis is at pains to dispute. The entry breaks off mid-description of the silver fox, suggesting Lewis was still composing when the manuscript ends.
Patterns of the Day
February 21 illustrates three durable patterns in the Fort Clatsop journals: the captains’ near-identical entries built from shared drafting; the enlisted journalists (Ordway especially) preserving the physical and emotional reality of expedition labor that the captains abstract into logistics; and Lewis’s tendency to use the relative quiet of winter quarters to compose extended zoological essays that Clark either truncates or omits entirely.
