The entries of January 28, 1806 offer a particularly clear example of how the four principal Fort Clatsop journalists divided the labor of expedition record-keeping. Patrick Gass and John Ordway log the day’s logistics in a few sentences; William Clark and Meriwether Lewis produce nearly identical, multi-paragraph entries that combine the day’s events with extended natural-history observations. Reading the four accounts side by side reveals both the shared field reality of a cold, hungry winter camp and the stratified registers in which that reality was committed to paper.
The Same Day, Two Levels of Detail
Gass and Ordway agree on the basic shape of the day. Gass notes that About half of our men were employed bringing home meat; and it was found a very cold uncomfortable business,
and adds that The two men who lately went to the salt works returned with a small supply.
Ordway is slightly more specific about numbers, recording that 14 of the party set out eairly to go after the meat,
and that the hunters could not find but 3 Elk in the thickets.
Ordway alone notices that the two men returning from the salt camp had killed a large otter
— a small detail absent from every other journal that day.
Clark and Lewis report the same movements but identify the participants by name: Drouillard and Baptiste Lepage departing on a hunting excursion, Howard and Werner returning with salt. Both captains explain why only three elk came in — a detail Gass and Ordway omit. Clark writes:
The Elk had been killed just before the Snow fell which had Covered them and So altered the apparant face of the Countrey that the hunters Could not find them.
Lewis’s parallel sentence is virtually identical in substance and phrasing, differing only in spelling and the addition of a clarifying clause: the hunters could not find the Elk which they had killed.
The captains also pass along the salt-makers’ complaint that they have killed two deer only in the last Six days; and that there are no Elk in their neighbourhood
— context that Gass compresses into the phrase a small supply
and that Ordway leaves out entirely.
Naming the Netul
It is also on this date that Clark and Lewis formally adopt an Indigenous place-name for the river beside their winter quarters. Clark writes that The River on which Fort Clat Sop Stands we now call Netul, this being the name by which the Clatsops Call it,
with Lewis recording the same decision in nearly identical words. Neither Gass nor Ordway notes the renaming — a reminder that the captains controlled the geographic nomenclature of the expedition’s official record, and that their enlisted journalists were not necessarily privy to (or interested in) such cartographic decisions.
A Botanical Set-Piece on the Pacific Crab Apple
The bulk of both captains’ entries is given over to a careful description of what modern botanists identify as the Pacific crab apple (Malus fusca). The two accounts are so close that one was almost certainly copied from the other, with Lewis’s version slightly more polished in its scientific vocabulary. Where Clark writes that the outer coat of the fruit is a thin Smothe, capsule with from three to four Cells,
Lewis distinguishes more carefully between layers: the outer coat of which is in a thin smoth, tho firm tough pillecle; the pericarp containing a membranous capsule with from three to four cells.
Lewis also self-corrects mid-description, noting I know not whether this fruit can properly be denominated a berry, it is a pulpy pericarp
— a phrase Clark reproduces almost verbatim.
Both captains emphasize the wood’s exceptional hardness and its ethnobotanical importance. Clark records that the natives make great use of it to form their wedges of which they Split their boards of Pine for the purpose of building houses,
and that the expedition has adopted the wood for ax handles, as well as glutt or wedges.
Clark adds an arresting domestic detail Lewis omits: The bark of this tree is chewed by our party in place of tobacco.
Lewis, in turn, includes a comparative note Clark leaves out, observing that the native also have wedges made of the beams of the Elk’s horns which appear to answer extremely well.
The pattern across the four entries is consistent with what scholars have long observed about the Fort Clatsop journals: Gass produces a brief soldier’s log; Ordway, a slightly fuller enlisted-man’s record with occasional unique details; and Lewis and Clark, working in close collaboration, produce parallel scientific entries in which Lewis tends toward greater technical precision and Clark toward additional ethnographic and practical observation.
