The entries of January 20, 1806 capture a quiet day at Fort Clatsop in which the dominant subjects are diplomatic visitation, dwindling provisions, and the ethnobotany of Clatsop subsistence. The four narrators present — Lewis, Clark, Gass, and Ordway — produce records of strikingly different scale and register, and a side-by-side reading exposes the well-documented Lewis-Clark textual dependency alongside the more independent observations of the enlisted men.
Twin Entries: Lewis and Clark in Near-Lockstep
The captains’ entries for this date are almost word-for-word identical, a phenomenon familiar to readers of the Fort Clatsop winter journals. Both open with the same observation about three Clatsop visitors:
Visited this morning by three Clapsots who remained with us all day; the object of their visit is mearly to Smoke the pipe.
Clark’s spelling (“Clapsots,” “mearly,” “Smoke”) differs from Lewis’s tidier “Clatsops” and “smoke,” but the syntax is identical. The same is true of the longer reflection on the party’s casual response to a near-empty larder:
we have latterly so frequently had our Stock of provisions reduced to a minimum and Sometimes taken a Small tuck of fasting that 3 days full allowance exites no concern.
Lewis’s parallel reads “a small touch of fasting,” suggesting Clark either misheard or miscopied the phrase — “tuck” for “touch” is the kind of slip that betrays the direction of transmission, though scholars continue to debate which captain drafted first on any given day. The arithmetic is shared too: six pounds of jerked elk per man issued on the 18th, exhausted by the evening of the 20th, leaving the seven elk in stores to feed the party only three days more.
Subsistence and Ethnobotany
Both captains close with a near-identical catalogue of Clatsop and Chinookan staple roots — thistle, fern, rush, liquorice, and an unidentified “small celindric root” whose flavor Lewis compares to a “sweet pittatoe” and Clark to a “sweet potato.” Both also record the same intelligence gleaned from the Clatsop visitors: that white traders on the coast do not barter for the pounded salmon prepared upriver, and that the dried fish circulates instead among the Clatsops, Chinooks, Cathlamets, and Skilloots. Clark adds the Tillamooks (“Kil a moxs”) to his list — a small but genuine divergence in an otherwise duplicated passage, and a reminder that the captains’ shared text is not always perfectly congruent.
The mention of the unidentified cylindrical root “the top of which I have not yet Seen” is characteristic of Lewis’s natural-history method: a careful note flagging an incomplete identification for later revision. That Clark reproduces the phrase verbatim suggests he is transcribing from Lewis’s draft rather than independently observing.
Gass and Ordway: The Enlisted Record
Patrick Gass writes outside the captains’ textual orbit. His entry for the 20th folds into a multi-day summary covering the 21st and 22nd as well, and he notices something neither Lewis nor Clark records on this date — the colossal conifers of the Pacific slope:
I saw some amazingly large trees of the fir kind: they are from 12 to 15 feet in diameter.
Gass’s diameters are not exaggerated; old-growth Sitka spruce and Douglas-fir of the lower Columbia routinely reach such sizes. Where the captains catalogue roots and rations, Gass — a carpenter by trade — measures timber. His sergeant’s eye for the dimensions of usable wood produces a detail entirely absent from the officers’ journals.
John Ordway’s entry survives only as a fragment: “verry pleanty about the fort.” Without context the antecedent is lost, though it likely refers to game, fleas, or visiting Indians, all of which were recurrent subjects in his Fort Clatsop entries. The brevity contrasts sharply with the captains’ polished paragraphs and underscores the different functions these journals served — Ordway’s a working log, Lewis’s and Clark’s a literary and scientific record under continual mutual revision.
Patterns of the Day
Three patterns emerge. First, the Lewis-Clark textual dependency is on full display: Clark’s entry is a transcription of Lewis’s, complete with shared phrasing and a revealing copyist’s slip (“tuck”/”touch”). Second, the captains’ shared interest in indigenous foodways and trade networks shapes a careful, if secondhand, ethnographic note about pounded-fish circulation among five named coastal nations. Third, Gass alone registers the monumental scale of the Pacific Northwest forest — a detail of considerable later interest that the officers, focused this day on stores and visitors, let pass.
