The journal entries of February 6, 1806 offer an unusually clear window into how the Lewis and Clark expedition divided its narrative labor. John Ordway, William Clark, and Meriwether Lewis all wrote from Fort Clatsop on the same day, but the three entries differ sharply in scale, register, and intent. Ordway delivers a single sentence of fieldwork. Clark and Lewis produce nearly identical multi-paragraph entries combining a terse administrative report with an extended botanical description of three species of fir.
The Elk Hunt: Three Registers
Ordway, who was part of the butchering party, writes in the plainest possible terms:
after the Elk meat, we went out to the Elk and butchred them this evening, & packed Some together & Camped, found 2 of the Elk in good order.
His entry is participatory and laconic — the perspective of a sergeant in the field who measures the day by what was packed and what was fit to eat. He does not mention theft at all.
Clark and Lewis, writing back at the fort, frame the same expedition as a logistical and diplomatic problem. Clark records:
Late in the evening Serjt. Pryor returned with the fish of about 2 Elk and four skins the Indians haveing taken the ballance of Seven Elk which Drewyer killed the other day. I find that those people will all Steal.
Lewis’s parallel sentence is almost word-for-word identical, but with two telling differences. Where Clark writes that the Indians “taken” the elk, Lewis writes that they “purloined” it — a more formal, legalistic verb. And Lewis omits Clark’s blanket condemnation (“those people will all Steal”), substituting instead an ethnographic note distinguishing the Wahkiakum from the Cathlamah:
I find that there are 2 vilages of Indians living on the N. side of the Columbia near the Marshy Islands who call themselves Wackki-a-cum. these I have hertofore Considered as Cath-lah-mahs.
The substitution is characteristic. Clark, throughout the expedition, is quicker to generalize about Native conduct; Lewis more often pivots toward classification — of peoples as of plants.
Who Copied Whom?
The botanical descriptions that follow — running to several hundred words on firs labeled No. 3, No. 4, and No. 5 — appear in Clark’s and Lewis’s journals in nearly verbatim form. Both describe the balsam fir’s leaves as “sessile, acerose, 1/8 of an inch in length” and both note that the bark covering the resin pustules is “soft thin smoth and easily punctured.” The convergence is so close that one entry must derive from the other.
Internal evidence points to Lewis as the author. The descriptions employ the technical botanical vocabulary — proliferous, gibbous, acerose, upper disk — that Lewis cultivated under Benjamin Smith Barton’s tutelage in Philadelphia. Clark’s spelling throughout the passage (“diameeter,” “hight,” “reather,” “redish”) betrays a copyist working through unfamiliar terms. Lewis writes “eighty or an hundred feet” for the height of the balsam fir; Clark writes “100 or 120 feet” — a small but revealing divergence suggesting Clark was not merely transcribing but adapting. Lewis also writes “the white pine of our county,” while Clark writes “the white pine of the U. States,” the kind of clarifying substitution a second hand might introduce.
What Each Narrator Notices
The day’s three entries together illustrate the expedition’s stratified record-keeping. Ordway captures the embodied work of butchering and packing — details Clark and Lewis, who remained at the fort, could not have supplied. Lewis supplies the scientific apparatus: the Latinate descriptors, the ethnographic correction, the careful comparison of Pacific firs to the “balsam fir of Canada” familiar from eastern North America. Clark, the indispensable middle term, copies Lewis’s natural history into his own book — ensuring redundancy against the loss of either journal — while preserving his own blunter judgments about the day’s diplomatic frictions.
The pattern is one the database sees repeatedly in the Fort Clatsop winter: Lewis composes the scientific descriptions; Clark transcribes and localizes them; the sergeants record the labor that made such leisure for description possible. On February 6, all three layers are visible in a single day’s work.
