The journal entries for March 9, 1806 reveal the characteristic stratification of Fort Clatsop record-keeping during the expedition’s final weeks on the Pacific. Patrick Gass, John Ordway, Meriwether Lewis, and William Clark each note the day’s events, but the proportional weight given to administrative routine versus natural-history observation differs sharply between the enlisted men’s notebooks and the captains’ parallel entries.
Shared Events, Divergent Detail
All four narrators register the visit of Clatsop traders bearing eulachon — the small, oily smelt that had become a staple of late-winter diplomacy at the fort. Gass notes simply that natives “brought some of the small fish, which they call Ulken” and that “The Indians remained in the fort all night.” Ordway adds the commercial particulars, recording that the Clatsops came “with some small fish and a little bears wax to trade to us. we bought a fiew.” Lewis and Clark, writing in near-identical language, specify three visitors who brought “a dog some fish and a Sea Otter skin for sale,” and note the captains’ decision to suffer them to remain overnight.
The fishing party under Sergeant Pryor is similarly noted across the entries. Gass attributes the delay to “the high swells in the bay,” while Lewis and Clark both suppose the men “are detained by the winds” — a small variance suggesting the captains shared a phrase while Gass formed his own inference. Ordway, characteristically focused on labor, instead reports his own day’s task: he and ten others retrieving the meat of two elk that Collins had killed.
The Captains’ Parallel Natural History
The most striking pattern of the day is the near-verbatim correspondence between Lewis’s and Clark’s entries on the swans and ducks of the lower Columbia. Both captains move from the morning’s events into an extended ornithological digression that the enlisted journalists do not attempt. Lewis writes of the smaller swan:
it begins with a kind of whistleing sound and terminates in a round full note which is reather louder than the whistleing, or former part… from the peculiar whistleing of the note of this bird I have called it the whistleing swan
Clark’s version is essentially identical, preserving even the admission that the call “cannot be justly immetated by the Sound of letters.” The pattern — Clark copying Lewis’s natural-history passages with light orthographic variation — is well established by this point in the winter, and Clark occasionally adds a personal touch, such as noting that Shields was set to make elk-skin sacks “to contain my papers,” where Lewis had written only “various articles.”
The captains’ treatment of the canvasback is equally parallel and equally detailed. Both describe it as “one of the most delicious in the world,” identify it with the bird known on “the Delliware, Susquehannah, and Potomac” as canvasback and on the James as shell-drake, and lament that it has “already left this neighbourhood.” Lewis frames the appeal to “the epicure of those parts of the union”; Clark’s pluralized “epicures” is one of the few substantive variations.
Register and Audience
The contrast between the four narrators on this single date illustrates the documentary economy of the expedition. Gass, whose journal would be the first published, writes with a compressed, almost weather-diary brevity and runs his March 9 and March 10 entries together on the page. Ordway records what he himself did and what was bought — useful corroboration but no taxonomy. Lewis composes the day’s natural-history set piece, and Clark transcribes and lightly adapts it, producing the redundancy that has long allowed editors to reconstruct damaged passages by collation.
What no enlisted journalist mentions at all is Bratton’s worsening back pain, which Lewis diagnoses as “something of the rheumatism” and treats with liniment and flannel. The captains’ medical responsibility shapes their record as much as their scientific ambition does: the same entry that names the whistling swan also tracks a man’s convalescence, while Gass and Ordway, untasked with either, let both pass unremarked.
