The entries for March 19, 1806 offer one of the clearest illustrations in the expedition record of how differently the three journal-keepers at Fort Clatsop processed a single day. Sergeant John Ordway compresses the day into a fragment — provisions and weather. Captains Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, by contrast, deliver lengthy, nearly identical ethnographic disquisitions on the Killamucks, Clatsops, Chinnooks, Cathlahmahs, and Wahkiakums. The contrast in register, length, and content reveals both the division of labor among narrators and the captains’ practice of shared composition during the winter encampment.
Ordway’s Telegraphic Day Against the Captains’ Essay
Ordway’s full entry reads:
Elk meat, hard Showers of rain intermixed with Snow and hail.
Eleven words. The sergeant notes the commissary fact (elk delivered to the fort) and the meteorological fact (a mixed-precipitation storm), and stops. Lewis and Clark independently confirm both pieces of information — Lewis writes that
It continued to rain and hail today in such manner that nothing further could be done to the canoes
and Clark echoes
It continued to rain and hail in Such a manner that nothing Could be done to the Canoes
— but they bury the weather in a single opening clause before turning to matters of more sustained interest. Both captains then record that a party retrieved the elk killed the previous evening, and both note the issuance of a certificate of good conduct to the Clatsop chief Comowool (Coboway), "alias Connia" in Lewis’s spelling, "alias Cania" in Clark’s. The diplomatic gesture — a written endorsement plus a list of expedition members’ names — is the kind of detail Ordway, focused on garrison routine, omits entirely.
Parallel Texts: Lewis and Clark on Lower Columbia Peoples
The bulk of both captains’ entries is devoted to a comparative ethnographic sketch, and the textual relationship between them is exceptionally close. Lewis opens his catalogue with five nations; Clark adds a sixth, the "Chiltz," suggesting he was either expanding Lewis’s draft or working from a slightly different list. Phrasing thereafter runs in near-lockstep. Lewis describes the people as
low in statue reather diminutive, and illy shapen; possessing thick broad flat feet, thick ankles, crooked legs wide mouths thick lips
while Clark writes
low in Statue reather diminutive, and illy Shaped, possessing thick broad flat feet, thick ankles, crooked legs, wide mouths, thick lips
— virtually identical apart from capitalization and orthography.
Small divergences are nonetheless telling. Lewis describes the nose as "moderately large, fleshey, wide at the extremity with large nostrils"; Clark renders it more compactly as "noses Stuk out and reather wide at the base." Where Lewis cites infants of "10 or eleven months" whose foreheads measure "not more than two inches thick," Clark gives "11 or 12 months" — a one-month drift that suggests one captain was paraphrasing the other from memory or from notes rather than transcribing verbatim. Clark also expands the exception to the "Flat Heads" designation: Lewis names only the "Aliahtans or snake Indians"; Clark adds "So-so-ne" as a synonym, integrating Shoshone terminology the expedition had acquired the previous summer.
Both captains arrive at the same anthropological inference — that head-flattening, practiced uniformly west of the Rockies, is
a strong proof that those nations having originally proceeded from the same stock
in Lewis’s wording, and
a Strong proof of those nations haveing originally proceeded from the Same Stock
in Clark’s. The shared conclusion, like the shared phrasing, indicates collaborative drafting rather than independent observation written up the same afternoon.
What the Parallels Reveal
The March 19 entries strengthen the established view that during the Fort Clatsop winter the captains pooled ethnographic material, with one drafting and the other copying and lightly revising. The directionality is debated, but the small additions in Clark’s version here — the Chiltz, the Shoshone gloss — are characteristic of a copyist annotating rather than originating. Lewis’s prose is marginally more discursive (he lingers on eye color, "dark yellowish brown the puple black," a detail Clark trims), while Clark’s is slightly tidier in syntax.
Ordway’s terse line, meanwhile, is not a failure of observation but a reminder of the documentary ecosystem: the sergeant’s journal exists to log subsistence and weather, and on a day when nothing could be done to the canoes, there was little else for him to record. The captains’ essay on physiognomy and cranial deformation belongs to a separate genre entirely — natural-history reportage intended for Jefferson and posterity — and it is in such passages, rather than in daily logistics, that Lewis and Clark’s pens most often move as one.
