The journal entries for January 27, 1806, offer an unusually clear window into how information traveled through the chain of command at Fort Clatsop. All four narrators register the same external event — Shannon’s return with news of ten elk killed — but the elaboration each writer brings to the day diverges sharply by rank, register, and audience.
One Hunting Report, Four Registers
Patrick Gass, writing in the briefest mode, opens with weather: snow nine inches deep, melting only where the sun broke through the fir canopy. His mention of the elk is secondhand and stripped of names:
In the afternoon a hunter came in and informed us that the party he had been with had killed 10 elks.
Gass does not name Shannon, Labiche, or Reubin Field. The number — ten — is what matters.
John Ordway, by contrast, breaks the kill down by hunter:
George Shannon came to the Fort and informed us that he had killed five Elk and informed us that R. Feilds had killed three Elk and Labuche 2 Elk. but some of them too far to pack in.
Ordway, a sergeant attentive to the logistics of provisioning, preserves the arithmetic of the hunt and flags the practical problem — distance — that the captains will then weigh.
Lewis and Clark record the same encounter in nearly identical language, including the specific topographical complaint that two elk lay
near the top of a mountain, that the rout by which they mus be brought was at least four miles by land through a country almost inaccessible from the fallen timber, brush and sink-holes, which were now disgused by the snow.
Clark, copying Lewis as he often did during the winter, adjusts the distance to five miles by land and adds the orienting detail that the remaining eight elk lay “at no great distance from the Netul river, on which we are” — a small but characteristic Clark touch, situating the event geographically for a future reader.
Mercury, Lobelia, and Sumac: A Medical Digression
Where the enlisted men’s entries end, the captains’ continue at length. Lewis reports that
Goodrich has recovered from the Louis veneri which he contracted from an amorous contact with a Chinnook damsel. I cured him as I did Gibson last winter by the uce of murcury.
Clark transcribes the passage almost verbatim, but with one revealing alteration: where Lewis writes “I cured him,” Clark writes “he was Cured as Gibson was with murcury by ____” — leaving a blank where Lewis claimed personal credit. The blank is the trace of Clark’s habit of copying Lewis without always asserting Lewis’s first-person authority as his own.
The medical digression then opens into ethnobotany. Lewis credits the Chippewa as
better skilled in the uce of those simples than any nation of Savages in North America
and describes a decoction of lobelia root combined with a small sumac, identified by its “winged rib, or common footstalk, which supports it’s oppositely pinnate leaves.” The botanical precision — the winged rachis of Rhus, the pinnate arrangement — is exactly the kind of diagnostic detail Lewis cultivated. Clark reproduces it with only spelling variants (“Labelia,” “Sumake”), demonstrating again that the natural-history passages of the Clark journal are, on many days, Lewis filtered through Clark’s orthography.
The Solme Berry
The day closes with Lewis’s description of a berry the natives call “solme,” likened in habit to Solomon’s seal: a globular fruit with a thin pellicle enclosing soft pulp and three or four white seeds. Clark’s version is again a near-copy, with a redundant doubling — “a thin Soft Pellicle rine which encloses a Soft Pellicle pulp” — that suggests transcription fatigue rather than independent observation.
What emerges across the four entries is a layered record. Gass gives weather and a number. Ordway gives the names and the logistical hitch. Lewis gives the command decision, the medical case, the comparative ethnography, and the botany. Clark gives Lewis again, in his own hand, with the small slips and emendations that mark a working copy rather than an original. For anyone studying how the expedition’s knowledge was produced and circulated within Fort Clatsop, January 27 is a useful day: the same elk, four times, at four different magnifications.
