February 17, 1806 produced four overlapping accounts of activity at Fort Clatsop, and the convergences and divergences among them illuminate the working relationships and editorial habits of the expedition’s journalists. The day’s events were unremarkable by frontier standards: hunters returned with elk, word arrived from the salt works that production was sufficient, and a wounded carrion crow was brought in alive. Yet each narrator filtered these occurrences through a distinct sensibility.
Clark and Lewis: The Captains in Near-Lockstep
The most striking pattern is the near-verbatim agreement between William Clark and Meriwether Lewis. Both open with identical phrasing about Collins and Windsor being “permited to hunt to day towards the praries in point Adams.” Both report Shannon, Labiesh, and Frazier returning with elk flesh “a little before noon,” and both note that the hunters “did not See Sergt. Gass or any of his party.” The medical update on Bratton and Gibson, the salt-works report from Joseph Field, and the dispatch of six men to retrieve the kettles are recorded in nearly the same sequence and language.
This parallelism is consistent with the captains’ established Fort Clatsop practice of sharing notes — one likely copying from or alongside the other. The differences emerge only in their elaborations. Clark devotes the latter portion of his entry to a comparative natural history of the brown/grizzly and black bears, distinguishing their ranges:
The Brown, White, or Grizly Bear are found in the rocky mountains in the timbered part of it or Westerly Side but rarely; they are more Common below or on the East Side of the Rocky Mountains on the borders of the plains where there are Copses of bushes and underwood near the water cources.
Lewis, by contrast, fixes his attention on a single specimen — the wounded “large carrion Crow or Buzzads of the Columbia” brought in by Shannon. What follows is one of the expedition’s most precise zoological descriptions, a measured anatomy of what would later be identified as the California condor:
I bleive this to be the largest bird of North America. it was not in good order and yet it weighed 25 lbs… between the extremities of the wings it measured 9 feet 2 inches; from the extremity of the beak to that of the toe 3 F. 91/2 In.
Lewis records iris color (“pale scarlet red”), pupil proportion, tail-feather count, scale patterns on the toes, and the white wing-stripe — the kind of systematic field description that distinguishes his scientific writing from Clark’s more geographic and comparative approach.
Ordway and Gass: The Enlisted Men’s Register
John Ordway and Patrick Gass, both sergeants, write in a markedly different register — shorter, plainer, focused on personnel movement and tally. Gass’s entry is the briefest of the four, summarizing the salt-works report with characteristic economy:
One of the men brought word from the salt works, that they had made about 4 bushels of salt; and the Commanding Officers thought that would be sufficient to serve the party.
Notably, Gass gives the salt quantity as “about 4 bushels,” while Clark and Lewis specify “2 Kegs… (say 3 bushels).” The discrepancy suggests Gass either rounded loosely or received a different secondhand report — he was, after all, returning from his own hunting party that same afternoon and was not present for Joseph Field’s direct briefing of the captains.
Ordway, who was at the fort, captures details neither captain records: the elk was taken “out of a creek where some of the hunters had killed [it] in the after part of the day,” and the men “killed a gray Eagle and a new kind of a Turkey buzzard” — the same condor Lewis would dissect descriptively. Where Lewis sees a scientific specimen, Ordway notes simply “a new kind” of bird, the enlisted man’s eye for novelty without the taxonomic apparatus.
What Each Narrator Misses
Cross-reading reveals telling omissions. Gass, the subject of much of the day’s action, says nothing about the eight elk his own party killed — that figure appears only in Ordway’s and Clark’s entries. Clark mentions the captured condor only obliquely (if at all in this passage), leaving Lewis as the sole detailed witness to what is arguably the day’s most significant zoological encounter. Ordway, meanwhile, is the only narrator to mention the gray eagle alongside the buzzard, a small datum that would otherwise be lost.
Together the four entries demonstrate how the expedition’s documentary record functioned as a distributed system: the captains’ parallel official narratives anchored by shared phrasing, supplemented by Lewis’s specialized natural history, Clark’s geographic synthesis, and the sergeants’ ground-level reporting of who went where and what was killed. No single journal preserves the full day; only their juxtaposition does.
