The journal entries for January 22, 1806 at Fort Clatsop offer one of the clearest demonstrations in the expedition record of how Lewis and Clark composed in tandem yet diverged in scientific ambition. Both captains open with the same news in nearly identical language: a hunting party returned with poor meat, three men remained in the woods, the salt supply was exhausted, and no word had come from the parties dispatched toward Point Adams. From there, however, the two narratives split into very different registers.
A Shared Opening, A Common Source
The opening paragraphs of the two entries are so close that one was clearly copied from the other, or both from a shared field note. Clark writes that the meat “was in verry inferior order, in Short the animals were pore,” while Lewis records it “was in very inferior order, in short the animals were poor.” Clark notes:
we have not heard a word of the other hunters who are below us towards point adams and the Praries.
Lewis renders the same sentence with only minor adjustment:
we have not yet heared a sentence from the other two parties of hunter’s who are below us towards Point Adams and the Praries.
The pattern is familiar from the Fort Clatsop winter: the captains shared logistical observations almost verbatim, with Clark’s spelling characteristically rougher and Lewis’s phrasing slightly more formal (“a sentence” for “a word,” “two parties of hunter’s” specifying what Clark leaves general).
The Fern: Where the Two Naturalists Part Company
The divergence becomes dramatic when both men turn to the edible fern. Clark dispatches the subject in a single sentence:
that of which the nativs eate produce no flowers whatever or fruit of a fine green Colour and the top is annual, and in Course dead at present.
Lewis, by contrast, devotes an extended technical description running several hundred words. He specifies habitat (“open uplands and praries…deep loose rich black lome”), root depth (“about 4 Inces beneath the surface”), and root structure with the precision of a trained botanist:
the center of the root is divided into two equal parts by a strong flat & white ligament like a piece of thin tape on either side of this there is a white substance which when the root is roasted in the embers is much like wheat dough and not very unlike it in flavour, though it has also a pungency which becomes more visible after you have chewed it some little time
Lewis proceeds through stem morphology, the “forty to fifty alternate pinate leaves,” and the leaves’ transition from “multipartite” to “tongue like” form. The vocabulary — multipartite, revolute, sessile, cottanny, perennil — is consistently more technical than anything Clark attempts. This is Lewis writing as the expedition’s designated naturalist, drawing on the Linnaean training he had received from Benjamin Smith Barton in Philadelphia.
Clark’s Compensating Detail: Foodways and Trade
Where Lewis pursues morphology, Clark turns ethnographic. Only Clark’s entry describes how the licorice is prepared — roasted in embers, pounded with a small stick to separate the “Strong liggaments,” the network membranes discarded by the eater — and offers the comparative judgment that the root “possesses an agreeable flavour not unlike the Sweet potato.” Clark also extends to the thistle root, prepared “pounded fine and mixed with Cold water, untill reduced to the Consistancy of Gruel,” and to the wapato, which Lewis omits entirely on this date.
Clark’s wapato passage is geographically specific in a way that complements Lewis’s structural descriptions:
the bulb of the Sagitifolia or common arrow head, which grows in great abundance in the marshey grounds of that butifull and fertile vally on the Columbia commenceing just above the quick Sand River and extending downwards for about 70 miles. this bulb forms a principal article of trafic between the inhabitents of the vally and those of their neighbourhood or Sea coast.
Here Clark situates a plant within a regional trade economy — the kind of economic geography that often distinguishes his entries from Lewis’s more strictly botanical observations.
A Working Division of Labor
Read together, the January 22 entries suggest that by the Fort Clatsop winter the captains had settled into a workable division: shared journal openings on camp logistics, with Lewis taking the lead on systematic botanical description and Clark recording preparation methods, taste comparisons, and trade relationships. Neither account alone gives the full picture; the modern reader needs both.
