The journal entries for January 15, 1806 offer one of the clearest windows into the collaborative writing practices of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark during the Fort Clatsop winter. Both captains open with the completion of a fur coat, both dismiss the day as otherwise uneventful, and both then launch into a detailed ethnographic description of Chinookan hunting implements that runs in close textual parallel for several hundred words. The convergences are too exact to be coincidental; the divergences are too consistent to be accidental.
The Tiger-Cat Coat and the Question of Authorship
Lewis records the coat in the first person:
“Had a large coat completed out of the skins of the Tiger Cat and those also of a small animal about the size of a squirrel not known to me; these skins I procured from the Indians who had previously dressed them and formed them into robes; it took seven of these robes to complete the coat.”
Clark’s version shifts the possessive and the comparative:
“Capt. Lewis had a large Coat finished made of the Skins of the tiger Cat, and those of the Small animal about the Size of Small Cat not known to me.”
The substantive change is telling. Lewis, who owned the coat and procured the skins, compares the unknown small animal to a squirrel. Clark, copying or paraphrasing, renders it as “the Size of Small Cat”—a slip that may reflect proximity to the phrase “tiger Cat” in the same sentence, or simply Clark’s independent recollection of the animal. Either way, the entries demonstrate that Clark is not transcribing Lewis verbatim; he is rewriting in his own orthography while preserving the substance. Lewis also notes a planning detail Clark omits entirely: “we had determined to send out two hunting parties today but it rained so incessantly that we posponed it.” Clark compresses this to “rained hard all day.”
Ethnography in Stereo
The technological description that follows is one of the most thorough accounts of Lower Columbia hunting equipment in the expedition record, and the two captains track each other almost phrase by phrase. Both list the same implements in the same order—”the gun the bow & arrow, deadfalls, pitts, snares, and spears or gigs”—and both deliver the same judgment on Native firearms as “old refuse American & brittish Musquits” kept “invariably in bad order.”
A small but revealing difference appears in the description of improvised ammunition. Lewis writes that when powder runs short, hunters “substitute gravel or peices of potmettal.” Clark records only “Gravel,” omitting the pot-metal detail. This pattern—Lewis supplying a second specimen or qualifier that Clark drops—recurs throughout the entry and is consistent with what scholars have long observed: when the captains’ entries diverge, Lewis tends to be the fuller observer of material culture, while Clark abridges toward the essential.
The bow measurements show another characteristic divergence. Lewis gives the bow as “two and a half feet in length” with extremities “half an inch wide.” Clark renders the same bow as “two feet Six inches long”—the same measurement expressed differently—but writes that the tips are “3/4 of an Inch wide.” Whether this is a transcription error or an independent measurement, it is the kind of small numerical drift that suggests the two men were working from a shared field notebook or oral discussion rather than one copying the other’s finished prose.
Register and Orthography
Even where the substance is identical, the captains’ habits of spelling and capitalization remain distinct. Clark capitalizes nouns liberally—”Skins,” “Coat,” “Bow,” “Sinues,” “Gleue,” “Sturgeon”—a practice closer to eighteenth-century convention. Lewis is more sparing with capitals and slightly more consistent in spelling, though he too produces “Musquits,” “extreamly,” and “posponed.” Clark’s “Cath lah mahs” and Lewis’s “Cuthlahmahs” record the same Cathlamet ethnonym through different ears. Lewis arranges the barb materials as “stone, iron or copper”; Clark writes “Iron Copper or Stone.” The order in which each man recalls the materials may reflect nothing more than the contingencies of memory, but it confirms that neither entry is a clean copy of the other.
Read together, the January 15 entries function less as two independent observations than as a single ethnographic report rendered in two hands. The captains were almost certainly comparing notes—possibly drafting from a shared outline—then writing up parallel fair copies in their own voices. For readers of the expedition journals, this date offers a useful baseline for distinguishing genuine cross-narrator corroboration from textual interdependence: when Lewis and Clark agree this closely, they are not two witnesses but one collaborative author working in stereo.
