The journal entries for February 27, 1806 at Fort Clatsop offer a textbook example of the expedition’s stratified record-keeping. Three men sat down to write about the same day — the same returning hunters, the same sick men in their bunks — and produced documents that diverge wildly in length, focus, and ambition. Sergeant John Ordway compresses the day into two sentences. Captains Clark and Lewis produce nearly identical opening paragraphs and then peel apart into separate zoological essays.
The Hunters’ Return: A Shared Paragraph
Clark and Lewis open with what is plainly a shared text. Lewis writes:
Reubin Fields returned this evening and had not killed anything. he reports that there are no Elk towards point Adams. Collins who had hunted up the Netul on this side returned in the evening having killed a buck Elk. Willard still continues very unwell the other sick men have nearly recovered. Gutridge and McNeal who have the pox are recovering fast, the former nearly well.
Clark’s version is virtually identical, with characteristic spelling variants — “Reubin Field” for “Fields,” “Goodrich” for “Gutridge,” “haveing” for “having,” “Sholders” for “shoulders” further down. Clark adds one detail Lewis omits: “La Page complaining.” The pattern of one captain copying the other’s daily summary is well documented for the Fort Clatsop winter, and this entry shows Clark working from Lewis’s draft (or both from a common source) while occasionally inserting an additional observation from his own notice.
Ordway, by contrast, gives the same events in the compressed register of the enlisted journal-keeper:
out a hunting, in the afternoon one of our hunters returned had killed one Elk. willard verry sick the rest of us are some better.
Ordway does not name Reubin Field, Collins, Goodrich, or McNeal. He does not distinguish the pox cases from ordinary illness. His “the rest of us are some better” places him inside the community of the sick — a perspective the captains, writing from above the sickbed, never adopt. Where Lewis and Clark catalogue the men by name and condition, Ordway reports the collective weather of morale.
Two Captains, Two Animals
After the shared paragraph, Lewis and Clark diverge into independent natural-history work, and the divergence is revealing. Clark devotes the bulk of his entry to the badger — “The Braro so called by the French engages” — producing one of the most detailed physical descriptions of the species in the journals. He attends to the digging feet (“five long fixed nails on each foot; those of the fore feet are much the longest”), the muscular forelegs “formed like the turnspit dog,” and the curious flattened silhouette produced by the long rump hair, which “givs to all the hinder part of the body an accute angled triangle, of which the point of the tail forms the accute angle.” The geometry is Clark’s: he sees the animal as a shape problem.
Lewis on the same day writes about a different animal entirely — the bushy-tailed woodrat of the Rocky Mountains, distinguished from the Atlantic-coast rat by its hair-covered tail. He cross-references his own earlier work: “one of those we caught at the White bear Islands in the beginning of July last and was then discribed.” He extends the comparison eastward to “the Western parts of the State of Georgia and also in Madison’s cave in the state of Virginia,” then pivots to the panther, noting its range across plains, mountains, and coast and its identity with the Atlantic species. Lewis’s instinct is comparative and continental; Clark’s is descriptive and morphological.
Register and Reach
The three entries together demonstrate the expedition’s documentary division of labor. Ordway supplies the lived texture of the camp — who is sick, who feels better — in the plain idiom of a sergeant. Clark, working partly from Lewis’s draft, anchors the official daily record and contributes a meticulous anatomy of the badger. Lewis ranges further, situating Fort Clatsop’s fauna within a transcontinental zoology that reaches from the Pacific coast to a Virginia cave. None of the three duplicates the others’ contribution, and only by reading them together does February 27 emerge as both a slow day at winter quarters and a productive day for the expedition’s scientific enterprise.
