The 18th of February 1806 produced a typical Fort Clatsop tableau: routine logistical errands frustrated by Pacific weather, a brief trade visit from Clatsop and Chinook neighbors, and — in the captains’ tents — extended natural-history descriptions of specimens carried in by the men. The four surviving accounts diverge sharply in length and ambition, allowing a clear view of how information moved up and down the chain of command.
Parallel Sergeants, Parallel Sentences
Sergeants Gass and Ordway, leading the two work parties, each produce terse operational entries. Gass writes that a sergeant and six men set out to go to the salt works, to bring the salt and kettles to the fort,
while he himself started with 10 more to bring in meat; but the weather was so stormy we could not get round the bay.
Ordway, who was the sergeant Gass refers to obliquely, gives the mirror image from his own perspective:
with a canoe for the Salt works. 10 more set out for the Elk meat, we found the wind so high at the bay that we had to return to the Fort, had Several Squawls of wind & rain.
Each sergeant records what he himself did and notes the other party only in passing — a useful reminder that these journals were kept independently at the non-commissioned level, not coordinated. Ordway alone preserves the meteorological detail of Several Squawls of wind & rain,
while Gass alone names the cargo (salt and kettles
).
Lewis and Clark in Near-Lockstep
The captains’ entries, by contrast, are nearly identical for their first paragraph — a well-known feature of the Fort Clatsop winter, when one officer copied from the other. Compare Clark’s opening:
This morning we dispatched a party to the Salt works with Sergt. Ordway. and a Second party with Sergt. Gass after the Eight Elk killed over the Netul.
with Lewis’s:
This morning we dispatched a party to the Saltworks with Sergt. Ordway and a second with Sergt. Gass after the Elk killed over the Netul.
The wording, sentence order, and even the observation that Clatsop and Chinook visitors are not readily obstructed by waves in their canoes
appear in both. Small differences are telling: Clark specifies Eight Elk
where Lewis writes only the Elk
; Clark counts the visitors as a Clatsop & Seven Chinnooks
while Lewis lumps them as eight Clasops and Chinnooks.
Clark also adds a sharper diplomatic postscript — Since their departure we have discovered that they have Stole an ax
— which Lewis omits entirely.
Divergent Specimens: A Cat and a Pine
The most striking difference between the captains’ entries is what each chooses to dwell on after the shared narrative frame. Clark turns to a robe brought in by Whitehouse, made from three skins of what he calls the Tiger Cat
:
this animale is about the Size or reather larger than the wild Cat of our Countrey and is much the Same in form, agility and ferosity. the colour of the back, neck and Sides, is a redish brown irrigular varigated with Small Spots of dark brown the tail is about two inches long nearly white except the extremity which is black; it termonates abruptly as if it had been cut off.
The animal — almost certainly a bobcat — gets a full ethnographic frame as well: Clark notes that three whole Skins is the complement usually employed, and Sometimes four in each roab.
Lewis, meanwhile, ignores the cat entirely and devotes his journal space to a conifer specimen Ordway has carried back, which he provisionally numbers No. 7
:
this tree seldom rises to a greater hight than 35 feet and is from 2 1/2 to 4 feet in diameter; the stem is simple branching diffuse and proliferous… the under disk of these leaves or that which grows nearest towards the base of the bough is a deep glossey green while the upper or opposite side is of a mealy whiteish pale green; in this rispect differing from almost all leaves.
Lewis’s botanical prose is technical and Linnaean in flavor (acerose,
imbricated scales,
gibbous
), the vocabulary of a man working through a key. Clark’s zoological prose is comparative and observational, anchored to familiar reference points like the wild Cat of our Countrey
and the Louserva of the N West.
The contrast is characteristic: Lewis pursued the formal description of new species; Clark recorded animals as they entered Indigenous economies and his own field of view.
Patterns of the Day
Three patterns emerge across the four narrators. First, the sergeants’ brevity establishes the day’s bare facts; the captains then elaborate, sometimes copying one another almost verbatim. Second, where Lewis and Clark diverge, they divide labor — Lewis to the pine, Clark to the cat-skin robe — suggesting a deliberate or habitual specialization. Third, only Clark records the theft of the ax, a small reminder that the captains’ accounts, despite heavy textual overlap, are not interchangeable: each retained his own eye for what mattered.
