The journals of February 19, 1806 offer a revealing cross-section of how four expedition narrators, sharing the same cramped quarters at Fort Clatsop, allocated their attention. The day’s domestic event was straightforward: Sergeant Gass returned from an elk hunt with meat and hides, while Sergeant Ordway departed with a party to retrieve salt and kettles from the works on the coast. Yet the four accounts diverge sharply in length, register, and subject matter.
The Working Sergeants and the Officer-Naturalists
Patrick Gass, who had himself just returned from the field, compresses the day into two sentences, noting only that the serjeant and 7 men again set out for the salt works by land
and that The day was very wet and stormy.
His weather observation is functional — the testimony of a man who has just walked through it.
John Ordway, leading the salt-works party, supplies the experiential detail Gass omits. He is the only narrator to describe the journey itself:
crossed the prarie where the land is in ridges like the waves the frozen rain beat in our faces verry hard, we got on the coast crossd a river where we waided to our middles and was glad to git in an old Indian house where we made a fire and Stayed all night. Sand flew & waves rold
Ordway’s simile — prairie ridges like the waves
— and his closing rhythm of Sand flew & waves rold
show a narrator with an ear for cadence, even amid wet clothing and freezing rain. Neither Lewis nor Clark, sheltered at the fort, registers the storm at all.
Lewis and Clark in Parallel
The captains’ entries for this date demonstrate the close textual relationship that scholars have long recognized between their Fort Clatsop journals. Their opening paragraphs are nearly identical in structure and phrasing. Lewis writes that Sergt. Ordway set out again this morning with a party for the salt works by land,
and Clark writes that Sergt. Ordway Set out again with a party to the Salt works by land.
Both report Gass’s return with the flesh of eight Elk, and seven skins,
both note that Shannon and Labiche (Clark) or Labuishe (Lewis) remained over the Netul to Continue the chase,
and both record that the skins were divided among the messes for covering baggage in the spring.
The pattern of shared narrative followed by divergent natural-history appendices is characteristic of the captains’ winter writing. Having dispatched the day’s events in a single paragraph, each turns to a separate zoological subject. Clark devotes the bulk of his entry to the foxes of the region — the black fox or Fisher,
the silver fox, the red fox of the plains, the kit fox, and the common gray fox. He is candid about the limits of his knowledge, noting of the silver fox that I have never Seen more than the Skins of this Animal
and questioning the very name of the fisher: how this Animal obtained the name of fisher I know not, but certain it is, that the name is not appropriate, as it does not prey on or Seek it as a prey.
Lewis, on the same day, takes up deer instead — the common red deer of the Chopunnish country and the black-tailed fallow deer peculiar to this coast.
His description of the latter’s gait is precise and comparative:
bounding with all four feet off the ground at the same time when runing at full speed and not loping as the common deer or antelope do.
That the captains chose complementary rather than overlapping subjects on the same date suggests deliberate division of labor in their natural-history project, even as they continued to share a common narrative frame for daily events.
Registers and Silences
The four entries together produce a layered record. Ordway alone preserves the storm’s sensory weight; Gass alone reports it from the perspective of a man recently soaked. Clark alone mentions the sick — I gave Bratten 6 of Scotts pills which did not work him. he is very weak and Complains of his back
— a domestic medical detail Lewis silently passes over. Lewis and Clark together produce the day’s scientific yield, dividing the mammals of the lower Columbia between them.
What no narrator captures fully on its own emerges only through juxtaposition: a fort-bound day in which officers wrote taxonomy while enlisted men waded chest-deep through coastal rivers in freezing rain.
