The journal entries for February 23, 1806 offer an unusually clean case study in how the Fort Clatsop winter shaped the expedition’s documentary record. Three narrators write on the same day from the same place, but produce radically different texts: Meriwether Lewis composes a long natural-history treatise on the sea otter; William Clark copies Lewis’s entry almost verbatim into his own journal; and Sergeant John Ordway records a single fragmentary line about his own illness.
Ordway’s Silence and the Captains’ Notice
Ordway’s entry survives only as a brief admission of sickness:
are now Sick I think that I and three others have the Enfluen-zey.
This terse self-report acquires significance when read against Lewis’s entry of the same day. Where Clark notes simply that our Sick are all on the recovery,
Lewis is more precise, singling out the sergeant by name:
our sick are all on the recovery, except Sergt. Ordway who is but little wose and not very ill tho more so than any of the others.
The cross-reference is telling. Ordway, normally one of the more diligent enlisted diarists, manages only a sentence fragment because he is the sickest man in the fort. Lewis, in turn, is the only narrator to register that fact. Clark’s parallel sentence about the sick — composed in lockstep with Lewis on most points — omits the exception entirely, smoothing the report into a more general optimism. The discrepancy is small but characteristic: Lewis tracks individuals by name; Clark often generalizes the men’s condition.
The Sea Otter: Lewis Composes, Clark Copies
The bulk of both captains’ entries is devoted to a careful zoological description of the sea otter. The two texts run so closely in parallel that the relationship is unmistakably one of copying rather than independent observation. Compare Lewis’s opening:
The Sea Otter is found on the sea coast and in the salt water. this anamal when fully grown is as large as a common mastive dog.
With Clark’s:
The Sea Otter is found only on the Sea Coast and in the Salt water… The Sea otter when fully grown is as large as the common mastif dog
Clark inserts a clarifying detail absent from Lewis — a paragraph distinguishing the true sea otter from the harbor seal he had earlier misidentified on the Columbia:
Those animals which I took to be the Sea Otter from the Great Falls of the Columbia to the mouth, proves to be the Phosia or Seal which at a little distance has every appearance of the Sea Otters.
This addition is one of the few places where Clark departs from Lewis’s text, and it is autobiographical: Clark is correcting his own prior misidentifications in earlier journals. The interpolation suggests that Clark was not merely transcribing but actively reading Lewis’s entry against his own field experience and amending where he had something personal to add.
Elsewhere the two texts track each other almost word for word, including the Chinookan vocabulary Lewis recorded. Lewis renders the terms Spuck
for the infant otter and E-luck’-ke
for the adult; Clark gives Spuck
and E luck’ko
. Both narrators relate the same epistemic episode — having once supposed the young and adult otters distinct species before learning otherwise — in nearly identical phrasing. A single ethnographic anecdote has been encoded twice in the expedition’s official record.
Register and Small Divergences
The minor variations between Lewis and Clark are revealing of habit. Lewis calls the otter’s pelt the most delicious fur in the world
; Clark, perhaps uncomfortable with the gustatory adjective applied to fur, writes the most delightfull fur in the world.
Lewis writes silkey
; Clark writes silky.
Lewis uses fir
at one point where Clark consistently writes fur.
These are the fingerprints of transcription under fatigue — a copyist’s eye correcting some forms while propagating others.
The day’s three entries thus capture the Fort Clatsop documentary economy in miniature: Lewis as principal author of natural-history prose, Clark as faithful but lightly editorializing duplicator, and the enlisted diarists — when health permits — providing the granular record of bodies and weather that the captains’ grander descriptions tend to crowd out.
