The entries of January 26, 1806 from Fort Clatsop offer one of the clearest examples in the expedition’s winter record of how its three narrators allocated their attention. Meriwether Lewis and William Clark devote the bulk of their writing to a meticulous botanical description of the shallon shrub (Gaultheria shallon), while Sergeant John Ordway confines himself to a single sentence on the weather. The disparity is not accidental: it reflects established roles within the captains’ joint journal-keeping practice and the more circumscribed observational duties of the enlisted diarists.
Parallel Texts: Clark Copying Lewis
The botanical passages in Lewis’s and Clark’s journals for this date are so closely matched that comparison leaves little doubt Clark transcribed from Lewis’s draft. Lewis writes:
The Shallun or deep purple berry is in form much like the huckkleberry and terminates bluntly with a kind of cap or cover at the end like that fruit; they are attatched seperately to the sides of the boughs of the shrub by a very short stem hanging underneath the same…
Clark’s version is essentially identical in structure and wording, though shorn of the plant’s name:
The or deep purple berry is in form much like the huckleberry and termonate bluntly with a kind of Cap or cover at the end like that fruit; they are attached Seperately to the Sides of the boughes of the shrub by a very Short Stem ganging under neath the Same…
The blank space where Lewis supplies “Shallun” suggests Clark intended to fill in the native name later and never did. Small divergences accumulate through the passage: Lewis describes the leaf margin as “slightly serrate,” a detail Clark omits entirely; Lewis calls the leaf “thick firm smothe and glossey,” while Clark records only “thick Smothe and glossy.” Clark’s spellings — “ganging” for “hanging,” “fotstalk,” “horozontal,” “butifull” — diverge from Lewis’s in idiosyncratic directions, confirming that Clark wrote in his own hand rather than mechanically copying. The pattern is consistent with what scholars have long recognized at Fort Clatsop: Lewis composed the natural-history descriptions, and Clark transcribed them, sometimes condensing or losing fine points along the way.
The Missing Salt-Makers
Both captains open with the same administrative concern. Lewis records that “Werner and Howard who were sent for salt on the 23rd have not yet returned,” worrying that the men are not “very good woodsmen” and that “this thick heavy timbered pine country added to the constant cloudy weather” makes navigation difficult. Clark notes only the dispatch of Collins:
We order Collins to return early in the morning and join the Salt makers, and gave him Some Small articles of merchendize to purchase Some provisions from the indians in the event of their Still being unfortunate in the chase.
Lewis’s parallel sentence is virtually word-for-word identical, but he alone supplies the context — the missing men, his anxiety about their woodcraft, the obscuring effect of the Pacific Northwest’s overcast skies on dead reckoning. Clark, in this instance, records the order without the reasoning behind it. Readers depending solely on Clark’s journal would miss the human stakes of the day entirely.
Ordway’s Window onto the Weather
Sergeant Ordway’s entry is fragmentary as preserved, but its content is wholly meteorological:
of last night and continues this morning, and cold freezing weather the Snow is this evening about 5 Inches deep on a level.
Ordway notes a measurable detail neither captain records — five inches of snow on the level — and confirms the “cold freezing weather” that Lewis only implies through his concern for Werner and Howard. The captains’ weather diaries usually capture such measurements separately, but Ordway’s habit of folding precipitation and temperature directly into his daily narrative gives his journal an independent evidentiary value. Where Lewis turns to taxonomy and Clark to administration, Ordway keeps an eye on the conditions the men in the field actually face.
Three Registers, One Day
Taken together, the three entries illustrate how the expedition’s documentary record was layered rather than redundant. Lewis supplies the scientific description and the worried command-level perspective; Clark transcribes the science and the order, occasionally losing detail in transit; Ordway, working in a plainer register, anchors the day in physical fact. The shallon passage in particular — appearing in nearly the same words in two journals while absent from the third — shows the captains’ collaborative method at work, with Clark drawing on Lewis’s draft to populate his own notebook even as the snow accumulated outside the fort.
