What the journals actually feed the party
An earlier version of this page said the diet essay could not be written because no journal entries had been supplied. The published corpus is full of food. What follows is a seasonal sketch from those entries, not a calorie table and not a claim that every narrator ate the same supper.
The lower Missouri, 1804: buffalo and garden produce
By mid-September on the middle Missouri the captains are counting animals in the open country. Lewis’s 17 September 1804 natural-history day sits in a stretch of Clark entries that keep “Buffalow” in the daily kill. Garden produce arrives as gifts, not as a crop the Corps planted. At the Arikara villages on 11 October 1804 Clark recorded that each village “gave us Something to eate in their way, and a fiew bushels of Corn Beens &.” Two days later a chief “gave us 10 bushels of Corn, Some Beens & Simmins.” At Fort Mandan on 22 November he sent Sergeant Pryor for “100 bushels of Corn in ears” from Jessaume and took in about eighty.
Weippe and the Columbia: salmon, camas, dogs, wapato
On 20 September 1805, out of the Bitterroots, Clark’s advance party was fed “a Small piece of Buffalow meat, Some dried Salmon beries & roots” including the onion-like “Pas she co [quamash].” That is the first camas/salmon supper after the mountain crossing, and it made men sick — a fact the Weippe entries record even when this sketch does not linger on it.
On the Columbia, meat often means dogs purchased for fuel-scarce camps. Clark, 22 October 1805: “purchased a Dog for Supper” and “purchd. as much wood as Cooked our dogs this evening.” Lewis, 21 April 1806, still buying dogs to graze horses and eat: “we dined on some dogs which we purchased of these people.”
Wapato is the root that stands in for bread on the lower Columbia. Clark, 22 November 1805:
we purchased a fiew wappato roots for which we gave armbans, & rings to the old Squar, those roots are equal to the Irish potato, and is a tolerable Substitute for bread
Fort Clatsop and Camp Chopunnish
The Pacific winter is an elk winter when the hunters succeed, and a lean one when they do not. Clark’s mid-December 1805 Fort Clatsop days sit in that rhythm — building, hunting, measuring what came in — not in a single ration figure for the season.
On the return, waiting for snow to leave the Bitterroots, the Chopunnish root harvest is loud enough for Clark to hear from camp. 10 May 1806: “the noise of their women pounding the cows roots remind me of a nail factory,” and the men, he says, have their stomachs full again.
The pattern across these dates is local and seasonal: Mandan-Arikara corn in the cold months on the upper Missouri, buffalo when the plains are open, salmon and camas west of the mountains, dogs and wapato on the Columbia, elk at Clatsop, cowse on the Kooskooske. No one journal-keeper is the commissary for the whole route; Ordway and Gass often log the pot when the captains are writing geography.
