The fourth of March 1806 produced no event the captains of the Corps of Discovery thought worth narrating. Lewis opens with the formula “Not any occurrence today worthy of notice,” and Clark echoes him almost verbatim with “Not any accurrance to day worthy of notice.” Sergeant John Ordway, by contrast, contributes only a fragment about the weather — “tinues all this day” — the surviving tail of a sentence noting the persistent rain that defined the Fort Clatsop winter. The disparity in entry length is itself the day’s most revealing pattern: where the enlisted diarist falls silent, the captains turn inward to natural history and ethnography, filling the empty hours with descriptive prose intended for eventual publication.
Parallel Pens: Lewis and Clark in Lockstep
The March 4 entries offer one of the clearest examples in the journals of Clark copying directly from Lewis. The two passages track sentence by sentence through anchovy preservation, sturgeon storage, and an extended description of steam cooking. Lewis writes:
the Anchovey is so delicate that they soon become tainted unless pickled or smoked. the natives run a small stick through their gills and hang them in the smoke of their lodges, or kindle a small fire under them for the purpose of drying them.
Clark renders the same observation with only orthographic variation:
the Anchovey is so delicate that they Soon become tainted unless pickled or Smoked. the nativs run a Small Stick through their gills and hang them in the Smoke of their Lodges, or Kindle Small fires under them for the purpose of drying them.
The substance is identical; the differences are Clark’s characteristic capitalization of nouns and his idiosyncratic spellings (“nativs,” “Scrupilous,” “flaetches”). Yet Clark is not a passive copyist. He adds an independent comparative judgment Lewis omits, observing that the steam method surpasses “their usial way of bolting of other fish in baskets with hot Stones.” In his ornithological list, Clark also expands the lark’s range to include “the Missouri and the Illinois,” while Lewis cites only the Missouri. These small interpolations suggest Clark working from Lewis’s draft but consulting his own memory and field notes as he transcribed.
The Steam Pit Described
The technical centerpiece of both entries is a careful account of Chinookan steam cookery — a method the captains evidently witnessed firsthand and judged superior to European techniques. Lewis describes how flitches of sturgeon are layered with “small boughs of bushes” over heated stones, sealed with mats, and steamed by water poured among the rocks:
the vapor arrising being confined by the mats, cooks the fish. the whole process is performed in an hour, and the sturgeon thus cooked is much better than either boiled or roasted.
The endorsement is striking. After fifteen months of subsistence on boiled and roasted meat, both captains record an unambiguous preference for an Indigenous cooking method. Clark’s parallel passage preserves every step of the procedure, confirming the captains’ joint interest in documenting practical knowledge that might be of use to future travelers and traders on the Pacific slope.
A Catalogue of Familiar Birds
The latter half of both entries pivots to ornithology, and here the captains are engaged in a comparative project: distinguishing Pacific species from those already known on the Atlantic seaboard or the Missouri. The turtle dove, robin, magpie, log cock, and lark are all judged identical to eastern counterparts. The “Columbian robbin,” by contrast, is marked as a distinct woodland species, as are the “blue crested Corvus” (Steller’s jay) and the white-breasted corvus of the pine forests. Lewis frames the sandhill crane’s seasonal migration with notable precision, tracking it from Rocky Mountain summer breeding grounds to coastal wintering territory.
Clark’s version diverges most interestingly at the flycatcher description. Where Lewis describes “a small redish brown species with a short tail, round body, short neck and short pointed beak” with “fine black specks intermixed,” Clark drops the black specks and adds the comparative note that the bird is “the Same as that with us sometimes called the Wren” — a folk identification Lewis avoids. The variation hints that Clark, even when copying, cannot resist translating Lewis’s more formal natural-history register into the vernacular comparisons that mark his own narrative voice.
Ordway’s Silence
Ordway’s truncated weather note is a useful reminder of how the journals were stratified by rank and purpose. The captains used quiet days to compile the encyclopedic appendices Jefferson expected; the sergeants logged events. When nothing happened, Ordway had nothing to say. Lewis and Clark, conscious of an audience beyond the fort’s smoky walls, made the absence of incident itself an occasion for science.
