The journal entries of February 12, 1806, offer one of the clearest windows in the entire expedition record into how the captains’ notebooks were composed. Two of the three narrators present at Fort Clatsop—Meriwether Lewis and William Clark—produce nearly identical entries, while Sergeant John Ordway compresses the same events into a single sentence. The convergences and divergences between the three accounts illuminate the collaborative, transcriptive practice that produced the expedition’s natural-history record.
The Runaway Dogs: A Shared Opening
All three narrators record the day’s principal incident: a Clatsop man arrived at the fort with three dogs intended as restitution for elk that his people had stolen from a hunting party earlier in the month. Ordway’s account is terse, noting only that “Clatsop Indians came to the Fort and Stayed all night.” Lewis and Clark, by contrast, open with sentences that are word-for-word identical:
This morning we were visited by a Clatsop man who brought with him three dogs as a remuneration for the Elk which himself and Nation had Stolen from us Some little time Sence, however the dogs took the alarm and ran off; we suffered him to remain in the fort all night.
The only differences between Lewis’s and Clark’s versions are minor orthographic variants—Clark capitalizes “Stolen,” “Some,” and “Sence,” where Lewis uses lowercase and writes “since.” Such parallel passages are characteristic of the Fort Clatsop period, when the captains regularly copied from one another’s field notes. The substantive content—the diplomatic restitution, the comic detail of the dogs bolting before they could be received, the decision to lodge the visitor overnight regardless—is preserved verbatim across both notebooks.
Botany in Duplicate: Lewis Leads, Clark Follows
The bulk of both captains’ entries is given over to a careful technical description of two evergreen shrubs Lewis had first encountered at the Grand Rapids of the Columbia. Internal evidence makes clear that Lewis is the originating author and Clark the transcriber. Lewis writes in the first person—”I first met with at the grand rappids of the Columbia”—and Clark reproduces the same first-person construction without alteration: “I first met with at the grand rapids of the Columbia River.” Clark cannot have independently “first met with” these plants at the rapids in the sense Lewis means; the pronoun belongs to Lewis and survives the copying intact.
The botanical descriptions themselves are remarkable for their precision. Lewis catalogs the first shrub’s leaves as
cauline, compound and spreading. the leafets are jointed and oppositely pinnate, 3 pare & terminating in one, sessile, widest at the base and tapering to an accuminated point
and notes that each crenate margin is “armed with a subulate thorn or spine.” The plant, he concludes, “resembles the plant common to many parts of the U States called the mountain holley.” Modern botanists have identified these specimens as Oregon grape species (Mahonia aquifolium and Mahonia nervosa), and the descriptions remain detailed enough to support that identification two centuries later.
Clark’s transcription is faithful but introduces small variants that betray the act of copying. Where Lewis writes that the first shrub is “simple unbranced and erect,” Clark writes “Simple and erect,” dropping the redundant “unbranced.” Where Lewis gives the leaf length as “3 inches & a 1/4,” Clark writes “31/4 inches.” Where Lewis describes the second shrub’s apex as “mostly, but not invariably tirminated with a small subulate thorn,” Clark renders it “mostly but not entirely termonated.” The substitution of “entirely” for “invariably” is the kind of synonym-drift typical of manual transcription.
Register and Role
Ordway’s silence on the botany is itself informative. As a sergeant, his journal is an operational log: who came, who went, what was eaten, what was decided. The editorial footnote attached to his entry preserves Lewis’s memorable line that the evening’s marrowbone and brisket of boiled elk amounted, “for Fort Clatsop,” to “living in high stile”—a register of dry humor that Ordway himself does not attempt. The captains, meanwhile, are working in a different mode altogether: producing a scientific record intended for eventual publication, in which the runaway dogs and the morphology of Mahonia leaflets share equal billing as observations worth preserving.
February 12 thus offers, in miniature, the three-tiered structure of the expedition’s documentary output: Ordway’s compressed enlisted-man’s log, Lewis’s primary scientific composition, and Clark’s careful duplicate—each indispensable, but each playing a distinct role in the archive the expedition was building.
