The journals of March 20, 1806 catch the Corps of Discovery in suspension. Violent wind and rain pin the party at Fort Clatsop on what was meant to be a day of departure, and each of the four narrators reaches for the pen with a different instinct: to count, to summarize, to philosophize, or simply to record. Read together, the entries form a layered portrait of a winter ending — and reveal, once again, the textual intimacy between the two captains.
The Sergeants’ Ledgers: Counting the Winter
Patrick Gass and John Ordway both turn to arithmetic. Gass, ever the carpenter-sergeant with a head for tallies, offers the more precise accounting:
I made a calculation of the number of elk and deer killed by the party from the Ist of Dec. 1805 to the 20th March 1806, which gave 131 elk and 20 deer. There were a few smaller quadrupeds killed such as otter and beaver; and one racoon.
Ordway records nearly the same figures — “150 odd Elk killed by this party in the course of the last winter, and 20 deer” — though his elk count runs noticeably higher than Gass’s 131. The discrepancy is characteristic: Gass dates his tally exactly and admits that “the meat of some of the elk was not brought to the fort,” while Ordway rounds upward and pivots immediately to a detail neither captain mentions:
the party has now got in all 338 pair of good Mockasons the most of them good Elk Skins Mockasons.
This is the kind of quartermaster’s detail Ordway frequently catches and the captains overlook. Three hundred thirty-eight pairs of moccasins represents the practical labor of a winter — the conversion of those 131 (or 150) elk into the footwear that will carry the men back across the continent. Ordway, alone among the four, links the hunt to its end product.
The Captains in Parallel: Lewis Composes, Clark Copies
The entries by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark are, as on so many days at Fort Clatsop, virtually identical in substance and phrasing. Lewis writes:
Altho we have not fared sumptuously this winter and spring at Fort Clatsop, we have lived quite as comfortably as we had any reason to expect we should; and have accomplished every object which induced our remaining at this place except that of meeting with the traders who visit the entrance of this river.
Clark’s version is word-for-word the same, with only minor orthographic variation (“Altho we have not fared Sumptuously…”). Scholars of the journals have long recognized that on such days Clark transcribes Lewis’s entry into his own field book, sometimes inserting small substantive changes. One occurs here: Lewis records that Drewyer and the Fieldses were to hunt “near the bay on this side of the Cathlahmahs,” while Clark writes that they were to hunt “above Point William.” The two phrasings describe the same general region but reflect Clark’s preference for cartographic landmarks — Point William being a feature he himself named — over Lewis’s ethnographic referent (the Cathlahmah village).
A second small divergence appears in the gun-repair passage. Lewis assigns the broken cock screw to Sergeant Pryor’s weapon and the new lock to Drewyer’s; Clark reverses the attribution. Such inversions suggest Clark wrote from memory or hurried dictation rather than direct copying, at least on this detail.
Shields, Harpers Ferry, and the Captains’ Pride
Both captains close with the same satisfied note about the expedition’s armorer:
but for the precaution taken in bringing on those extra locks, and parts of locks, in addition to the ingenuity of John Shields, most of our guns would at this moment been entirely unfit for use.
The passage carries a faint self-congratulation — the “precaution” was Lewis’s own, taken at Harpers Ferry in 1803 — alongside genuine credit to Shields, the blacksmith whose improvisational skill recurs throughout the journals. Neither Gass nor Ordway mentions the gun repairs. The captains’ attention to materiel, to the slow attrition of equipment over two winters in the field, belongs to a register the sergeants do not share. Where Gass counts carcasses and Ordway counts moccasins, Lewis and Clark count what the expedition has accomplished and what — the absent traders, the still-ailing Bratton and Willard — it has not.
The four entries together suggest the division of narrative labor that had settled over the Corps by its second winter: sergeants kept the practical books, captains kept the official one, and on slow days at Fort Clatsop, Clark kept Lewis’s.
