The Last Journey of Meriwether Lewis

My goals in this chapter are three. They are almost certainly delusional. First, I want to write the clearest account ever published of the last days of Meriwether Lewis, to assemble the facts as far as we can reconstruct them, to provide all readers with a complete, accurate, and reliable account of the events of 4 September-11 October 1809, and their aftermath.

Second, I want to write about the death of Lewis in a way that everyone will regard as fair―the murder theorists (hereafter murderists) and the suicide theorists (hereafter suicidists) and everyone in between. My hope is that even those who disagree with my conclusions will respect my narrative and my analysis.

Third, I want to make the case for suicide as carefully and as humbly as I possibly can, not as a lawyer marshals evidence on behalf of the conclusion he wishes you to reach, but as a dispassionate humanities scholar who has been led to the conclusion of suicide by the evidence of the case. In other words, I have no ax to grind, no bias that I am aware of, and my mind is open, so far as I can tell. If new evidence would make it seem more rational to conclude that Lewis was murdered, I would cheerfully follow those findings to their logical conclusion.

State of Affairs, Summer 1809

Here’s what we know. Lewis was appointed governor of Louisiana Territory on 28 February 1807. He did not arrive in St. Louis to take up his duties until 8 May 1808. He was in residence in St. Louis for a year and a half―actually, one year, five months, and twenty-seven days. By the summer of 1809, his world was beginning to fall apart. He was by now in an open breach with his lieutenant, Territorial Secretary Frederick Bates. In fact, their struggle brought them to the first stage of an affair of honor that might have led to a duel, if William Clark had not carefully stalled the process and ratcheted things down until Lewis was under greater self-control. The War Department in faraway Washington, DC, had begun to refuse to honor some of Governor Lewis’s vouchers, a few of them for very large sums of money, and the tone of correspondence from functionaries in the War Department to Lewis had become reproachful. The word had gotten around the territorial capital that Lewis’s official finances were being challenged at the highest levels of the United States government. This had the effect, as Lewis ruefully acknowledged, of causing his personal creditors to crowd in on him for payment. His personal solvency was in a perilous state. Rumors had begun to circulate to the effect that Governor Lewis would be recalled or at least not re-appointed, that the new Madison administration had lost confidence in him.

That was the public face of things. Lewis’s private world was also in disarray. Not for lack of determined trying, he had found it impossible to find a wife. Immediately after the expedition’s return, his friend William Clark had effortlessly courted and married Julia Hancock of Fincastle, Virginia, whose only fault was being the daughter of a Federalist. With comic lugubriousness, Lewis had come to think of himself as a “musty, fusty, rusty old bachelor.”^[2]Quoted in Jones, Shaping of the West, p. 163.

Lewis and Clark biographer John Bakeless, who is a murderist, summarizes the state of Lewis’s life at this juncture perfectly; excellently. “He was certainly ill. He had had difficulties with Bates, a singularly irritating individual. His personal finances were in a bad way. He had been drinking heavily. His reappointment was in doubt. His accounts were disputed by Washington auditors.”^[3]Bakeless, Partners in Discovery, pp. 425-426. To be perfectly fair, we have no way of knowing for sure that Lewis was drinking heavily.

Rational Pursuit?

In August 1809 Governor Lewis decided to make the long journey to Washington, DC, to defend his territorial actions and expenditures in a face-to-face meeting with the bureaucrats of the Madison administration. He also intended to visit his mother Lucy Marks and his patron and friend Thomas Jefferson in Albemarle County, Virginia, then venture to Philadelphia to move his book closer to publication. Attempts have recently been made to suggest that Lewis was not mentally disturbed at the time he left St. Louis in early September 1809. Lewis’s most recent biographers, Thomas Danisi and John Jackson, have provided extensive details of his professional activities in the spring and summer of 1809 in an effort to prove he was both busy and undeniably in possession of his rational faculties.^[4]Danisi and Jackson, Meriwether Lewis, p. 287. Vardis Fisher summarizes the same burst of administrative activity and concludes: “All this—his handwriting during these last days in St. Louis, his clear and orderly record of his debts, and his investing three friends with the power of attorney, to sell his property during his absence, if creditors should demand it—all this certainly does not look like the behavior of a man in a paroxysm.”^[5]Vardis Fisher, Suicide or Murder? The Strange Death of Governor Meriwether Lewis (Athens, OH, 1993), p. 73. Danisi and Jackson write, “Taking the time to tidy up a difference of opinion with his former mentor [Jefferson] showed that Meriwether was in complete command of his faculties.” With his packet of reports and vouchers, Lewis was going east to “convince those chair-bound bureaucrats that a frontier government required immediate decisions. Louisiana could not be directed at long distance over an imperfect system of communication.”^[6]Danisi and Jackson, Meriwether Lewis, p. 287. Danisi and Jackson go so far as to say, “[T]he governor of Louisiana had lost confidence in the present administration.”^[7]Danisi and Jackson, Meriwether Lewis, p. 287. This, in my opinion, is precisely the reverse of the truth.

Paroxysm of Despair

It may be worth remembering two things here. First, Lewis engaged in this burst of administrative activity solely because he was about to journey to Washington to face his accusers in the War Department. He was trying on the eve of his departure to bring order to the neglect and disarray that had gotten him into trouble in the first place. Any chance of being exonerated or vindicated in Washington would involve presenting in person the documents and detailed justifications of his actions that he had not taken the time to send to the War Department previously. All of these documents and reports should have been forwarded long since. It was their absence that led Madison administration officials, including the president himself, to question Lewis’s competence, ethical probity, and fitness for territorial office. In other words, the unusual burst of activity described by Danisi and Jackson was not a representative sample of Lewis’s administrative life in St. Louis. On the contrary, it was an emergency response to a period of significantly less focused activity. Second, Lewis did not accomplish these things alone. His closest friend William Clark worked side by side with him to put his affairs into something like order. Even if Clark didn’t actually create the documents in question, it was essential that he was at Lewis’s side to calm the governor and keep him focused on the tasks before him. Clark’s account of the final day he and Lewis spent together is profoundly sad. To his brother Jonathan, Clark wrote, “I have not Spent Such a Day as yesterday for maney years . . . . took my leave of Govr. Lewis who Set out to Philadelphia to write our Book, (but more perticularly to explain Some matter between him and the Govt.[)] Several of his Bills have been protested and his Crediters all flocking in near the time of his Setting out distressed him much, which he expressed to me in Such terms as to Cause a Cempothy which is not yet off—I do not beleve there was ever an honest er man in Louisiana nor one who had pureor motives than Govr. Lewis. if his mind had been at lease I Should have parted Cherefully . . . . “^[8]Holmberg, Dear Brother, p. 210. This is not the portrait of a man who is calmly and routinely attending to business in preparation for a long leave of absence.

Clark’s “I have not Spent Such a Day as yesterday for maney years” can only refer to the similar efforts he made in the late 1790s to bring some kind of order to his alcoholic brother George Rogers Clark‘s equally tangled legal and financial affairs. Clark had been familiar with Lewis’s temper, impulsiveness, and penchant for self-drama for fifteen years. He had lived in closest proximity with the mercurial Lewis for three years on the trail from Falls of the Ohio to the Pacific Ocean and back again. For Clark to notice and describe this level of distress in Lewis, “expressed to me in Such terms as to Cause a Cempothy which is not yet off,” suggests Lewis was indeed in a paroxysm of rage, bitterness, self-punishment, and self-pity at the time he departed from St. Louis. Clark’s reference to Lewis’s honesty and the purity of his motives makes clear that Clark was aware that the War Department had accused Lewis of dishonesty and impure motives with respect to the public-private mission to return Mandan leader Sheheke-shote to his home village in today’s North Dakota. It would be hard to imagine Clark describing Lewis’s state in terms of greater alarm and sorrow. This remarkable passage in a private letter by Lewis’s best friend refutes all the lists that could possibly be made of Lewis’s professional activity in the late summer of 1809. Danisi and Jackson say, “Although exasperated by the difficulties that the accounting process was creating, he was not hysterical.”^[9]Danisi and Jackson, Meriwether Lewis, p. 277. Actually, it sounds like he was. The great Bernard DeVoto wrote, “[I]t is clear that he was in a very nervous state when he left St. Louis.”^[10]De Voto, The Journals of Lewis and Clark, p. li. Jefferson himself wrote that, “He was in a paroxysm of one of these [sensible depressions of mind] when his affairs rendered it necessary for him to go to Washington.”^[11]De Voto, The Journals of Lewis and Clark, p. li. Jackson, Letters, p. 592.

On 8 July 1809, six weeks before he received the bombshell letter from the War Department that precipitated his final journey to the national capital, Lewis wrote to an unknown friend that the Madison administration’s rejection of his vouchers was causing him great distress. “[T]his occurrence has given me infinite concern,” he wrote, “as the fate of other bills drawn for similar purposes to a considerable amount cannot be mistaken; this rejection cannot fail to impress the public mind unfavourably with rispect to me, nor is this consideration more painfull than the censure which must arise in the mind of the executive from my having drawn for public monies without authority, a third and not less imbarrassing circumstance attending the transaction is that my private funds are entirely incompetent to meet those bills if protested.”^[12]Lewis to an unknown correspondent, 8 July 1809. Quoted in Danisi and Jackson, p. 268.

Lewis met with the Governor’s Council in St. Louis for the last time on 30 August.

Lewis left St. Louis on 4 September 1809. The Missouri Gazette wrote that the governor “set off in good health for New Orleans on his way to the Federal City.”^[13]Quoted in Ambrose, Undaunted Courage, p. 470. John Bakeless has said, “[T]he emphasis of the statement [by the Gazette] faintly suggests official propaganda.”^[14]Bakeless, Partners in Discovery, p. 412. Lewis’s original intention was to take passage on a flatboat or “keeled boat” all the way down the Mississippi River to New Orleans. From there he planned to take passage on a ship through the Gulf of Mexico, around the southern tip of Florida, and then up the East Coast to the Chesapeake, where he would find additional water conveyance either up the James River to Charlottesville (likely) or up the Potomac River to the federal capital.

Lewis’s baggage consisted of: a pair of red slippers; five vests; two pairs of pantaloons; one pair of black silk breeches; two cotton shirts; one flannel shirt; two pairs of cotton stockings; three pairs of silk stockings; a broadcloth coat; a silver tumbler; a tomahawk; a pistol case; a silver watch; several bundles of maps; “Two small bundles containing silk for dresses—for Mr. Clark”^[15]Jackson, Letters, p. 471.; three knives; a sword; a “pike blade” with a broken shaft (probably his espontoon); a sea otter skin; a supply of medicines; all of his official papers, including “One small bundle of Letters & Vouchers—of consequence”^[16]Jackson, Letters, p. 470.; and all the papers relating to his transcontinental journey, including the expedition’s journals.

One of the three men to whom Lewis had entrusted his private affairs during his absence, his friend William C. Carr, wrote a letter to his brother on 25 August 1809: “Our Governor left us a few days since with his private affairs altogether deranged. He is a good man, but a very imprudent one—I apprehend he will not return.”^[17]Quoted in Danisi and Jackson, Meriwether Lewis, p. 279. Things were that bad.

Changing Plans

Lewis arrived in New Madrid on 11 September 1809, approximately 250 miles downstream from St. Louis. He sent his free black servant Pernier ashore to collect food for supper and to obtain a competent legal witness. In New Madrid Lewis wrote his will. He left his estate, after all debts had been paid, to his mother Lucy Marks. Sometime before he reached New Madrid, Lewis decided to leave the Mississippi River and venture overland to Virginia. The reasons usually alleged for this change of plans are that Lewis was warned that fever was raging in the lower Mississippi River, or he feared that his papers, which included the journals and other documents relating to the expedition, might fall into the hands of the British, who were patrolling the Gulf of Mexico and boarding American vessels.

There may have been a third reason; Lewis was always most confident when he was in control of his own motion. In the course of the expedition, he frequently left the flotilla to walk on the shores of the Missouri River. When his own body was engaged in forward progress, he was invariably more optimistic, more productive, and more likely to write in his journal. Idleness and passivity were apparently destructive to his mental health. During the long delay at Long Camp on the return journey, on the Pacific side of the Rocky Mountains, Lewis wrote (on 17 May 1806) of “that icy barier which seperates me from my friends and Country, from all which makes life esteemable.—patience, patience.”^[18]JLCE, VII:267. On 14 June 1806, he wrote, “[W]e have now been detained near five weeks in consequence of the snows; a serious loss of time at this delightfull season for traveling . . . . every body seems anxious to be in motion . . . . “^[19]JLCE, VIII:24.

In September 1809, it must have been difficult for Governor Lewis, who once had led an expeditionary force 7,689 miles to the Pacific Ocean and back again, now to be reduced to the status of a mere passenger on a vessel making its way slowly down the Mississippi River. Danisi and Jackson write, “For Meriwether Lewis a lazy drift nodding in the warm sun should have been a welcome rest. Actually the tortuous pace prolonged his tension. In a fog of daily boredom and increasing pain Lewis tried to contain his growing sense of urgency, but the slow trip gave him too much time to churn matters over and over.”^[20]Danisi and Jackson, Meriwether Lewis, p. 289. David Lavender has said, “Lewis had too much time in which to brood, drink—and twice attempt to take his life.”^[21]Lavender, The Way to the Western Sea p. 384. Lewis was a naturally restless and impatient man. He may have decided, after a week of frustrating passivity, that he would rather travel overland to Washington, DC, than continue as a mere passenger on other people’s vessels. He was a man, as Jefferson put it, “habituated to the hunting life,”^[22]Jackson, Letters, p. 590. used to command, and impatient of all restraints.

In short, Lewis may have decided to leave the river because he had a sense that he would be better off, physically and mentally, on land, setting his own pace and directing his own movements.

At New Madrid, Lewis also wrote a letter to William Clark. That letter has been lost. From Clark’s characterizations of it after the death of Lewis, it seems to have struck Clark, after the fact, as a kind of suicide note, or a letter of such personal anguish that it essentially corroborated Lewis’s suicide. It probably also provided an explanation of the steps needed to complete Lewis’s book project, should Lewis perish on the journey to Philadelphia. In other words, the letter to Clark was written in the same mood that inspired Lewis to write his last will and testament at New Madrid. Clark may have lost the letter, along with a number of others he mentioned to his brother Jonathan in his letter of 28 October 1809.^[23]Holmberg, Dear Brother, p. 218. Clark: “I have left all my letters which I receved from defferent persons at your house’ or lost them, they are not with my baggage. will you be So good as … Continue reading It may also have been suppressed.^[24]Homberg, Dear Brother, p. 221 n: “One wonders if the letter revealed so much of Lewis’s troubled mental state that Clark may have even destroyed it to protect his friend.”

Suicidal Behavior

Sometime before he disembarked at Fort Pickering, at today’s Memphis, Tennessee, from the boat that was carrying him down river, Lewis had twice attempted to commit suicide. In an affidavit or deposition recorded two years after Lewis’s death, on 26 November 1811, Gilbert Russell, who had been in command of Fort Pickering when Lewis arrived, stated, “[T]he Commanding officer of the Fort on discovering his situation, and learning from the Crew that he had made two attempts to Kill himself, in one of which he had nearly succeeded, resolved at once to take possession of him and his papers, and detain them there untill he recovered, or some friend might arrive in whose hands he could depart in safety.”^[25]Quoted in Fisher, Suicide or Murder?, p. 82, and Starrs and Gale, The Death of Meriwether Lewis, p. 251. Neither Russell nor any other contemporary provided any more precise details of these incidents. No historian has ever ascertained just how Governor Lewis tried to commit suicide during his journey from St. Louis to Fort Pickering. More likely these suicide attempts occurred between New Madrid and Fort Pickering. Russell’s statement, “in one of which he had nearly succeeded,” is perplexing. It’s hard to believe this can refer to a suicide attempt involving pistols. No witness noticed any wounds on Lewis’s body before the final night at Grinder’s Inn. It is possible that, in a drunken or deranged state, Lewis brandished weapons—guns, his knife, his razor—and announced his intention to kill himself, but was physically subdued until he calmed down, passed out, or fell asleep. It is possible that he attempted to drown himself. For a man of his physical strength, however, that would be easier said than done. Thomas Danisi and John Jackson argue that these “suicide” attempts were responses to a severe bout of ague or malaria. “Unable to bear it any longer,” they write, “in a complex state of inescapable pain and intoxication, stepping over the side into the enveloping waters may have seemed the only way to end the torture.”^[26]Danisi and Jackson, Meriwether Lewis p. 291. This is a little melodramatic, but so indeed was Lewis. The phrase, “two attempts to Kill himself,” can cover a lot of ground, from the drunken ravings of a self-pitying man to a genuine attempt to take one’s own life. Improbable though all this sounds, there is no good reason to doubt Russell’s testimony. This is the sort of thing one might exaggerate, but not make up.

At any rate, Lewis arrived at Fort Pickering about two in the afternoon on 15 September, with this damaging information hovering about him. Captain Russell immediately realized that the governor was ill and mentally unstable. He placed Lewis under arrest, put the distinguished guest under the care of the surgeon’s mate W.C. Smith, and installed Lewis in the captain’s own quarters. In his letter to former president Jefferson of 4 January 1810, Russell wrote, “He came here on the 15th September last . . . . His condition rendered it necessary that he should be stoped until he would recover which I done.”^[27]Quoted in Fisher, Suicide or Murder?, pp. 81-82. I have italicized the word condition because the manuscript is nearly illegible.

In his 26 November 1811, deposition, Captain Russell wrote, “On the morning of the 15tht of September, the Boat in which he was a passenger landed him at Fort pickering in a state of mental derangement, which appeared to have been produced as much by indisposition as by other causes.”^[28]Quoted in Fisher, Suicide or Murder?, p. 82. Russell meant that on 15 September, at least, Lewis exhibited signs of mental illness, mental instability, or perhaps delirium principally because he was suffering from a severe physical ailment, probably malaria. Russell wisely placed Lewis under a kind of friendly house arrest, confined him to quarters, restricted Lewis’s intake of alcohol, and took care of his distinguished guest until the worst symptoms of the malaria passed and his toxicity (no doubt a combination of alcohol and medicines, including laudanum) diminished. In a letter to Jefferson of 4 January 1810, Captain Russell wrote, “[I]n a short time by proper attention a change was perceptible and in about six days he was perfectly restored in every respect and able to travel.”^[29]Quoted in Fisher, Suicide or Murder, p. 82. Although Russell deplored the subsequent death of Lewis, he rightly told Jefferson, “[A]s it has turned out I shall have the consolation that I discharged those obligations towards him that man is bound to do for his fellows.”^[30]Quoted in Starrs and Gale, The Death of Meriwether Lewis, p. 244.

Thomas Danisi and John Jackson have done an important service to Lewis and Clark studies, and particularly our understanding of Lewis, by documenting how seriously he suffered from bouts with malaria in the post-expedition period. Although I believe they wrongly played down Lewis’s mental instability and his sense of bitter rage during the weeks (18 August 1809-11 October 1809) following his receipt of the harsh rebuke from the War Department, Danisi and Jackson have presented the facts of Lewis’s sufferings at the hands of malaria so thoroughly that no future Lewis biographer will be able to ignore their findings or regard Lewis’s derangement as exclusively psychological in nature. It is certain that Lewis was in significant pain as he descended the Mississippi River in September 1809, and that his physical pain was alone sufficient to reduce his mental clarity.

The words that recur most often about Lewis’s condition in the last weeks of his life are deranged and derangement. The Oxford English Dictionary defines deranged as “disordered in mind; insane,” and cites several useful examples from the era in question.

Captain James House, for example, wrote a letter from Nashville on 28 September 1809, about what he had heard on the road about the indisposition of Governor Lewis. Lewis’s friend Amos Stoddard had told House that, near Chickasaw Bluffs, he had encountered someone “who informed him, that Governor Lewis had arrived there . . . in a State of mental derangement―that he had made several attempts to put an end to his own existence, which the patroon had prevented, and that Cap Russell, the commanding officer at the Bluffs had taken him into his own quarters where he was obliged to keep a strict watch over him to prevent his committing violence on himself and had caused his boat to be unloaded at the ferry to be secured in his stores.”^[31]Quoted in Fisher, Suicide or Murder?, p. 87. House went on to sound very much like Clark: “I am in hopes this account will prove exaggerated―tho’ I fear there is too much truth in it” [emphasis added throughout this section]. This letter is an important document in the suicide-murder debate, because it proves that the story of Lewis’s suicide attempts on the lower Mississippi River did not surface after Lewis’s death by way of adding credibility to the reports of his suicide. House’s letter was written at the end of Lewis’s stay at Fort Pickering, and eleven days before the incident at Grinder’s Inn.

In his letter announcing Lewis’s suicide to former President Jefferson, dated 18 October 1809, James Neelly wrote, “[O]n our arrival at the Chickasaw nation I discovered that he appeared at times deranged in mind. we rested there two days and came on . . . .” Neelly informed Jefferson that at Grinder’s Inn, “a woman [Priscilla Grinder] who discovering the governor to be deranged gave him up the house & slept herself in one near it.”^[32]Jackson, Letters, p. 467.

Captain John Brahan wrote, “No person being at home but the wife of Mr. Grinder the woman discovering the Governor to be deranged gave him up the house and slept herself in another house near it.”^[33]Quoted in Fisher, Suicide or Murder?, p. 140.

Gilbert Russell wrote several accounts of the two weeks he spent taking care of the ailing Lewis in September 1809. Three of those narratives are extant. In the first of those accounts, a letter to Thomas Jefferson dated 4 January 1810, Russell, who knew of Lewis’s suicide, reported that when he arrived at Fort Pickering Lewis was suffering from a “situation that rendered it necessary that he should be stoped until he would recover, which I done & in a short time by proper attention a change was perceptible and in about six days he was perfectly restored in every respect & able to travel.”^[34]Quoted in Starrs and Gale, The Death of Meriwether Lewis, pp. 243-244. Russell did not specify just what the situation was in the letter. In the second account, a letter to Jefferson dated 31 ary 1810, Russell explained that Lewis’s death was precipitated by “the free use of liquor,”^[35]Quoted in Starrs and Gale, The Death of Meriwether Lewis, p. 246. which Russell had prohibited Lewis at Fort Pickering, but which James Neelly had permitted and apparently encouraged on Lewis’s overland journey towards Nashville. This is the letter in which Russell blamed Neelly for Lewis’s death. On 26 November 1811, Russell produced his last extant account of the decline and death of Lewis. “On the morning of the 15th of September,” he wrote, “the Boat in which he was a passenger landed him at Fort pickering in a state of mental derangement, which appeared to have been produced as much by indisposition as other causes.”^[36]Quoted in Starrs and Gale, The Death of Meriwether Lewis, p. 251. Thanks to Russell’s careful ministrations and his refusal to give Lewis access to alcohol, “on the sixth or seventh day,” Russell wrote, “all symptoms of derangement disappeared and he was completely in his senses and thus continued for ten or twelve days.”^[37]Quoted in Starrs and Gale, The Death of Meriwether Lewis, p. 251. Unfortunately, once Lewis had resumed his journey, “in three or four days he was again affected with the same mental disease, [emphasis added]” perhaps because “By much severe depletion during his illness he had been considerably reduced and debilitated, from which he had not entirely recovered when he set off,” because “that country being yet excessively hot and the exercise of traveling [was] too severe for him,” and because “He had no person with him who could manage or controul him in his propensities.”^[38]Quoted in Starrs and Gale, The Death of Meriwether Lewis, p. 252.

On 26 November 1809, Clark wrote to his brother Jonathan about the disposition of Lewis’s papers. “I have just receved letters from Capt. Russell,” he reported, “who Commands at the Chickasaw Bluffs that Govr. Lewis was there detaind by him 15 Days in a State of Derangement most of the time and that he had attempted to kill himself before he got there.”^[39]Holmberg, Dear Brother, p. 228. Apparently Clark received letters from Gilbert Russell that have subsequently disappeared. Those letters confirmed the two prior suicide attempts, the house arrest at Fort Pickering, and Lewis’s mental derangement.

In his biographical sketch of Lewis of 18 August 1813, Jefferson wrote, “Mr. Neelly, agent of the U.S. with the Chickasaw Indians arriving there [Fort Pickering] two days after, found him extremely indisposed, and betraying at times some symptoms of a derangement of mind.”<^[40]Jackson, Letters, p. 592.

In 1845, the New York Dispatch published a retrospective article on Lewis’s death, drawn from a newspaper called the North Arkansas, published in Batesville, Arkansas. Although the article reported Priscilla Grinder telling a somewhat different account of Lewis’s death, it confirmed her observation “that Mr. Lewis was mentally deranged” on the evening of 10 October 1809.^[41]Quoted in Starrs and Gale, The Death of Meriwether Lewis, p. 259.

Mental Illness

Thus the overwhelming testimony of Lewis’s contemporaries was that in the last month of his life he was mentally ill, that his mental illness was related to and exacerbated by a severe physical indisposition (almost certainly malaria), and that his mental illness was worsened by “the free use of liquor which he acknowledged verry candidly,” and vowed to curtail, according to Gilbert Russell. Although some of these observations would be regarded as hearsay and derivative in a court of law, three of these contemporaries, Gilbert Russell, James Neelly, and Priscilla Grinder, had the opportunity to observe Lewis directly between 15 September and 11 October. They all used the word derangement in describing Lewis’s behavior. Jefferson’s account must have been based in part on James Pernier’s face-to-face report at Monticello sometime later in the autumn of 1809.

It seems quite likely that Lewis’s derangement was partly the result of a severe bout of malaria. Gilbert Russell explicitly considered that possibility. In other words, Lewis’s mental illness may not have been solely mental in nature, but a combination of physical and metaphysical factors. In his last letters, Lewis spoke of his indisposition and his state of exhaustion, but not of mental or physical derangement. Vardis Fisher argues that Lewis’s ability to write coherent letters to Madison and Stoddard “suggests that on his arrival at the fort he was delirious, or otherwise ‘deranged,’ because of heat and fever, and not that he had gone out of his mind because of his financial and other troubles.”^[42]Fisher, Suicide or Murder?, p. 85. Danisi and Jackson do their best to ignore the evidence of Lewis’s mental derangement and emphasize his physical illness instead. Thus: “Commanding officer Capt. Gilbert Russell was appalled to see a man who was obviously so sick . . . . Captain Russell was no doctor but he had seen many men, himself included, suffer from the ague.”^[43]Danisi and Jackson, Meriwether Lewis, p. 291.

On 16 September, the ailing Lewis, now under house arrest at Fort Pickering, wrote a letter to President Madison. Much has been made of the visual quality of this letter, which has been called “incoherent,” “garbled,” and “chaotic,” by various historians. John Bakeless says, “[I]ts sprawling and uncertain hand and the constant striking out of words and interlineation of others, to no particular purpose, show clearly that . . . he was far from being his usual bold and decisive self by the time he reached Chickasaw Bluffs.”^[44]Bakeless, Partners in Discovery, p. 412. Bakeless blames malaria for the mental confusion: “The best explanation of his odd conduct is probably malaria, as it is well known that fever of any kind invariably made him light-headed.”^[45]Bakeless, Partners in Discovery, p. 413. Danisi and Jackson argue that the orthographical confusion of the letter he wrote can be explained by way of Lewis’s malarial indisposition alone. The letter is undeniably jumbled in its visual presentation, but it is unobjectionable when viewed in a linear transcript.

Lewis informed the president of his change in itinerary. He indicated that he was bringing his financial records, “which when fully explained, or reather the general view of the circumstances under which they were made I flatter myself they will recieve both sanction & approbation and sanction.” Then Lewis apologized for having been a poor communicator: “My anxiety to pursue and to fullfill the duties incedent to the internal arrangements incedent to the government of Louisiana has prevented my writing you more frequently.”^[46]No two transcripts of this letter agree. I have made my own here from the facsimile of the original letter in Guice, By His Own Hand?, pp. 146-147. Finally, Lewis noted that he was enclosing a printed copy of the laws of Louisiana, which he had printed in St. Louis. Danisi and Jackson argue that this publication, “was Lewis’s answer, sent ahead, to those State Department bills that Madison continued to refuse, a matter of honor and withheld respect as much as accounting.”^[47]Danisi and Jackson, Meriwether Lewis, p. 291.

This was perhaps not the most lucid or eloquent letter that Lewis ever wrote, but it cannot be called incoherent. In short order he conveyed everything he wanted the president of the United States to know. Fisher is certainly right to conclude, “There seems to be no sign of insanity or mental derangement in the letter to Madison, but only signs of exhaustion and debility.”^[48]Fisher, Suicide or Murder?, p. 81.

The last letter Lewis wrote, dated 22 September 1809, was to his old friend Amos Stoddard, now the commander at Fort Adams on the lower Mississippi River. After providing a routine apology for his prolonged and inexplicable silence, Lewis explained that he would not now be descending the Mississippi River as planned, but traveling overland to the national capital. The only reason he gave for this change was “my indisposition.” He stated that he was on his way to Washington to explain some protested vouchers. “[A]n explaneation is all that is necessary I am sensible to put all matters right.” The actual purpose of the letter was financial. Because his personal finances had been compromised by his public difficulties, Lewis called on Stoddard to send him $200 that Stoddard was holding for him. Finally, he explained that in January “I expect I shall be on my return to St. Louis.”^[49]Quoted in Fisher, Suicide or Murder?, p. 83. [For a biographical sketch of Amos Stoddard (1772-1813), see Mississippi River above Cairo, Illinois,” footnote 1. —JM.]

Apparently Lewis was well enough that he could have resumed his journey sometime around 21 or 22 September but he delayed his departure for another week to accommodate Gilbert Russell, who attempted to get a leave of absence to permit him to make the same journey. Russell, too, had protested vouchers to clear up with the War Department. Eventually, the leave was denied. Russell wrote, “[H]e waited six or eight days expecting I would go with him, but in this we were disappointed.”^[50]Quoted in Starrs and Gale, The Death of Meriwether Lewis, p. 244.

Lewis left Fort Pickering on 29 ember 29. He was traveling with his free black servant Pernier and with Major James Neelly, the US agent to the Chickasaw Nation, and Neelly’s servant, whose name is unknown. Neelly had arrived at Fort Pickering on 18 September. He was bound for Nashville. So far as we know he had never previously met Lewis. When it became clear that Russell could not accompany Lewis, Neelly apparently offered to travel with Lewis as far as Nashville and watch over him. Russell later regretted that decision. “He [Neelly] seem’d happy to have it in his power to serve the Govr,” Russell wrote on 31 January 1810, “& but for making the offer which I accepted I should have employ’d the man who packed the trunk to the Nation to have them taken to Nashville & accompany the Govr. Unfortunately for him this arrangement did not take place, or I hesitate not to say he would this day be living.”^[51]Quoted in Starrs and Gale, The Death of Meriwether Lewis, p. 246. In other words, Russell believed a more reliable chaperon chosen by himself would have delivered Lewis safely to Nashville, kept liquor and gunpowder away from him, and made a special effort to keep him safe. Ideally the chaperon would have been Russell himself. Next best would have been “the [unnamed] man who packed the trunk to the [Chickasaw] Nation.” Neelly proved to be precisely the wrong man for the job, in Russell’s opinion.

Captain Russell lent Lewis ca. $100 and sold him two horses on credit. In return, Lewis signed a promissory note for $379.58, payable on or before 1 January 1810. Russell wrote that Lewis “set off with two Trunks which contained all his papers relative to his expedition to the Pacific Ocean.”^[52]Quoted in Fisher, Suicide or Murder?, p. 89. Russell said Lewis’s baggage now included “Gen’l Clark’s Land Warrant, a Port-Folio, pocket book Memo and note Book together with many other papers of both public and private nature and two horses two saddles and bridles a Rifle gun pistols pipe tommy hawk & dirk, all ellegant and perhaps about two hundred and twenty dollars, of which $99 58/100 was a Treasury check on the U.S. Bank of Orleans endorsed by me. The horses one saddle and the check I let him have.”^[53]Quoted in Fisher, Suicide or Murder?, p. 89. In turn, Lewis, who was unable to transport by land as much baggage as he had put on board the vessel on which he was descending the Mississippi River, left at Fort Pickering “two Trunks a case and a bundle which will now remain here subject at any time to your order or that of his legal representative,”^[54]Quoted in Fisher, Suicide or Murder?, p. 89. Russell informed Jefferson.

The first leg of this last journey took the party from Fort Pickering to somewhere in the Chickasaw Nation. The Lewis party of four (Lewis, Pernier, Neelly, Neelly’s servant) may have traveled with some Chickasaw Indian “chiefs.” The only reference we have to these Indians is from the affidavit Russell wrote two years later. Most scholars have assumed that Neelly took Lewis first to the Chickasaw Agency near today’s Houston, Tennessee, where Neelly attended to some business and where they intersected the Natchez Trace, but Danisi and Jackson have argued that it is more likely that Neelly and Lewis traveled due east from today’s Memphis to an intersection with the Natchez Trace. “Taking the Chickasaw Nation statement at face value meant an unnecessary detour that would have required a fifty-mile-a-day pace to reconcile with the known timeline.”^[55]Danisi and Jackson, Meriwether Lewis, p. 305 fn. For a variety of reasons, I believe Danisi and Jackson are wrong and that Lewis and Neelly indeed traveled from Fort Pickering to the Chickasaw Agency, remained there a couple of days, then rode the Natchez Trace all the way to Grinder’s Inn (see footnote).^[56]The Danisi-Jackson theory has many problems. Given the fact that Captain Russell’s man prepared a trunk for the “Nation,” and that Neelly was the US Agent to the Chickasaw Nation, … Continue reading At the Chickasaw Agency the party intersected the Natchez Trace, a narrow, but well-traveled trail carved out of the wilderness between Nashville, Tennessee, and Natchez, Mississippi. The Natchez Trace was one of America’s first government-sponsored highways. One of its purposes was to provide American farmers and entrepreneurs an alternative road for traveling between the lower Mississippi and the East Coast at a time when Spain was obstructing or threatening to obstruct traffic on the Mississippi River. Elliott Coues wrote that the trace was “cut to facilitate the movement of troops and the transportation of supplies to and from the newly acquired ‘Spanish country.'”^[57]Coues, The History of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, p. lii. General James Wilkinson concluded a treaty in 1801 with the Chickasaw Nation, permitting the US government to construct the highway through Chickasaw territory.

By the time the party arrived at “the Chickasaw nation,” according to Neelly, Lewis “appeared at times deranged in mind.” He was also drinking again―thanks entirely to the enabler Neelly, Gilbert Russell later alleged.^[58]Starrs and Gale, The Death of Meriwether Lewis, p. 246. Because of Lewis’s relapse, indisposition, and derangement, the party rested two days at “the Chickasaw nation,” probably at the agency. Neelly explained to Jefferson that “we rested there two days & came on.”^[59]Jackson, Letters, p. 467.

On 5 or 6 October, the party resumed its journey, now on the Natchez Trace. On 8 October, Neelly and Lewis crossed the Tennessee River and camped near today’s Collinwood, Tennessee. On the night of 9-10 October, two of the party’s horses strayed from the camp. Restless as ever, Lewis ventured ahead on his horse, “with a promise to wait for me,” James Neelly wrote to Jefferson, “at the first house he came to that was inhabited by white people.”^[60]Jackson, Letters, p. 467.

On the afternoon of 10 October, Lewis rode up alone to a frontier establishment known as Grinder’s Inn or Grinder’s Stand, located seventy-two miles from Nashville near today’s Hohenwald, Tennessee. Neely says it was “about sun set.”^[61]Jackson, Letters, p. 467. The inn was owned by Priscilla and Robert Grinder. Priscilla Grinder was approximately thirty-five years old. Robert Grinder was somewhere else that evening―probably at the Grinders’ settlement at Duck River, more than twenty miles away. It seems likely that Priscilla Grinder was at the inn alone with her two or three young children, and her twelve-year-old slave girl Malinda. Neelly said that when Lewis arrived there was “no person there but a woman.”^[62]Jackson, Letters, p. 467. Much has been made of the apparent discrepancy, but probably Neelly meant that Mrs. Grinder was the only responsible adult at the inn.

Grinder’s Inn consisted of two cabins linked by a fifteen-foot covered breezeway. This common connecting structure was known as a dogtrot.

Lewis was wearing a loose fitting blue-and-white striped cloak when he arrived. He asked Mrs. Grinder “if he could stay for the night” [Grinder-Wilson 1811].^[63]To give the reader as precise an account of what happened at Grinder’s Inn as possible, and to sort out as much as possible the various strands of historical testimony, I have put in brackets … Continue reading “[N]o person [was] there,” Neelly reported, “but a woman who discovering the governor to be deranged gave him up the house & slept herself in one near it.”^[64]Jackson, Letters, p. 467. Lewis carried his saddle into the cabin assigned to him. Priscilla asked Lewis if he was traveling alone. That would have been unusual.^[65]Guice, By His Own Hand?,p. 90: “The trace was still so dangerous in 1809, however, that the rough, tough boatmen always rode or walked up it in convoy. Travelers seldom ventured down the trace … Continue reading Lewis replied that two servants were somewhere behind him on the Trace, and that they would soon arrive. “He called for some spirits, and drank very little” [Grinder-Wilson 1811].

The two servants rode up. One of them was Lewis’s free black servant (not slave) John Pernier (also known as Pernia). Actually, Pernier was a mulatto, like so many other free black individuals of this era. The name of the other servant is not known. He may have been a slave. He was Neelly’s attendant. Mrs. Grinder says one of the servants was “a negro” [Grinder-Wilson 1811]. It may be that Pernier may have been white enough to “pass.” It is possible, but not likely, that Neelly was attended by a white servant.

Lewis asked Pernier about his gunpowder, saying he was sure he had some in a canister. According to Priscilla Grinder, Pernier seemed reluctant to answer Lewis’s question. “The servant gave no distinct reply” [Grinder-Wilson 1811]. The servants unsaddled their horses and led them toward the stable, located about two-hundred yards away from the cabins. That was where the servants spent the night. Lewis’s behavior soon struck Mrs. Grinder as erratic. For one thing, he began pacing back and forth in front of one of the cabins, muttering to himself. “Sometimes, she said, he would seem as if he were walking up to her; and would suddenly wheel round, and walk back as fast as he could” [Grinder-Wilson 1811].

Priscilla Grinder fed her guest. She reported that Lewis “had eaten only a few mouthfuls when he started up, speaking to himself in a violent manner” [Grinder-Wilson 1811]. The governor’s fits came and went. He raged, grew calm, then flared up again, his face “flush as if it had come on him in a fit” [Grinder-Wilson 1811]. Eventually, Lewis pulled a chair to the door of the cabin, lit his pipe, and gazed out at the Tennessee wilderness. “[I]n a kind tone of voice,” Lewis said, “Madam, this is a very pleasant evening” [Grinder-Wilson 1811].

He smoked for some time, but quitted his seat and traversed the yard as before. He again sat down to his pipe, seemed again composed and casting his eyes wishfully toward the west, observed what a sweet evening it was. “Mrs. Grinder was preparing a bed for him; but he said he would sleep on the floor, and desired the servant to bring him the bear skins and buffaloe robe, which were immediately spread out for him” [Grinder-Wilson 1811].

Just why Lewis chose to sleep on the floor is unknown. It may be that he found Mrs. Grinder’s accommodations unacceptable. Bed linens were seldom changed in those days, and it was not uncommon for a variety of people in various stages of cleanliness to sleep in the same linens, sometimes at the same time.^[66]Bakeless, Partners in Discovery, p. 417: “Soldier and explorer, he had slept that way often enough and probably preferred it to the rather dubious beds of such an establishment.” According to one version, Lewis explained to his host that he had not slept in a bed since his late tour. It’s very hard to believe that can be true.

“[I]t being now dusk the woman went off to the kitchen, and the two men [the servants] to the barn, which stands about two-hundred yards off” [Grinder-Wilson 1811].

Dusk on 11 October would have come at approximately 7:30 P.M. Pernier and Neelly’s servant went off to the barn, that puts Governor Lewis alone in one small log cabin, with his bear and buffalo robes taking up much of the floor, and Priscilla Grinder, who was the same age, preparing to sleep in some makeshift bed, fifteen-to twenty-feet away in the other cabin. If her children and slave were with her, as seems overwhelmingly likely, it was a snug fit in the cabin that doubled as a kitchen. Mrs. Grinder was unable to sleep.

“The kitchen is only a few paces from the room where Lewis was, and the woman being considerably alarmed by the behaviour of her guest could not sleep but listened to him walking backwards and forwards, she thinks for several hours, and talking aloud, as she said, ‘like a lawyer'” [Grinder-Wilson 1811].

So far Priscilla Grinder’s report squares perfectly with everything we know about Meriwether Lewis’s last journey. Periods of distraction and soliloquy alternated with periods of calm and civility. Fits came on him, flushed his face, consumed his attention, and then ebbed away. His symptoms were both physical and mental. Courtliness was juxtaposed with lawyerly argumentation. The same mental suffering and emotional intensity that had roused William Clark’s Cempothy in late August, the same violent interior dialogue that Gilbert Russell had witnessed at Fort Pickering, the fits and imposition that had been observed by Russell and Neelly, recurred at Grinder’s Inn on the last night of Lewis’s life. Nothing in Priscilla Grinder’s testimony to Alexander Wilson in 1811 is at odds in any way with what we know about Lewis’s behavior between 25 August (his last meeting with William Clark) and 10 October (his last moments with James Neelly). Nor was Mrs. Grinder’s behavior in any way unusual or improbable. She was alone (at least essentially alone) at a rustic frontier outpost with an erratic and intense man just a few yards away whose first words to his servant that evening had been a request for gunpowder. If Lewis really arrived around sunset, all of these events unfolded in a surprisingly brief period of time. Now the ill and deranged governor was in the room just across the breezeway, and instead of settling down for the night, thereby letting Mrs. Grinder relax into sleep, he was pacing about the floor talking violently to himself. The phrase, “she thinks for several hours,” suggests that Mrs. Grinder drifted in and out of sleep between the hours of 8 P.M.on 10 October 10 and 3 A.M.on 11 October.

“She then heard the report of a pistol, and something fall heavily on the floor, and the words, ‘O Lord.’ Immediately afterwards she heard another pistol, and in a few minutes she heard him at her door calling out ‘O madam! Give me some water, and heal my wounds’[Grinder-Wilson 1811].

Neelly explained to Jefferson that “the woman reports that about three o’Clock she heard two pistols fire off in the Governors Room” [Grinder-Neelly 1809].

Virtually all historians agree with the Grinder-Neelly and the Grinder-Wilson account of the events of 10 October 1809, so far. The governor arrived in the late afternoon or evening. His behavior was erratic and it upset Mrs. Grinder, who was the only white adult at the inn. She put Lewis in one room for the night and took the other for herself. He could not sleep because he was pacing and talking to himself, almost certainly about his struggles with the War Department or about Frederick Bates and his other detractors in St. Louis.^[67]Dillon, Meriwether Lewis, p. 332. Lewis was “wrapped in thought and anger as he rehearsed his upcoming confrontation with Secretary of War [William] Eustis.” She could not sleep because her guest was making a lot of noise, and his strange behavior had thrown her off of her center of gravity. Deep into the night, at approximately 3 A.M., Mrs. Grinder heard two shots go off in close succession. Somehow she recognized them as pistol shots.^[68]Fisher, Suicide or Murder?, p. 151. “No one has explained how the woman knew it was a pistol instead of a rifle: are we to assume that after she entered the cabin she looked at the … Continue reading She heard something or someone (presumably Lewis) “fall heavily on the floor” [Grinder-Wilson 1811]. She heard the wounded man (presumably, but not yet certainly Lewis) say, “O Lord!,” and “O madam! give me some water, and heal my wounds” [Grinder-Wilson 1811].

At this point the story begins to braid a little. Alexander Wilson wrote, “The logs being open, and unplastered, she saw him stagger back and fall against a stump that stands between the kitchen and room. He crawled for some distance, raised himself by the side of a tree, where he sat about a minute. He once more got to the room; afterwards he came to the kitchen door, but did not speak; she then heard him scraping the bucket with a gourd for water” [Grinder-Wilson 1811]. All accounts emphasize Lewis’s thirst in the aftermath of the shooting. In his letter to Jefferson, Neelly wrote, “[S]he heard two pistols fire off in the Governors Room: the servants being awakined by her, came in but too late to save him. He had shot himself in the head with one pistol & a little below the Breast with the other” [Grinder-Neelly 1809]. Proponents of the murder theory (murderists) argue that Priscilla Grinder could not possibly have seen Lewis staggering around the breezeway and the yard of the inn. The night of 10-11 October was, they correctly indicate, a time of a virtually new moon (new moon, 9 October), and even that sliver of the moon had set long before folks at Grinder’s Inn went to bed. Thus Priscilla Grinder could not possibly have actually seen Lewis staggering about in the faint starlight, unless he was illuminated by candles or a lantern, neither of which are mentioned in any account of the incident.^[69]Guice, By His Own Hand, p. 94. It is, of course, quite possible that Lewis had lit a lantern or candle in his unchinked quarters. Without illumination neither Lewis (nor any putative assassin) would have been able to take careful aim in the darkened cabin. The argument from lunar data, frequently played as a kind of trump card to discredit Mrs. Grinder’s testimony, raises as many questions as it settles. Whatever else is true, we can be certain that 10–11 October was a very dark night on the Natchez Trace.

Just how long Priscilla Grinder waited before she roused the servants (her own or those traveling with Lewis), and just when she first looked in on the stricken governor is another matter that has precipitated feverish historical debate. Neelly’s timeline has Mrs. Grinder awakening the servants immediately after hearing the gunshots―if not in real time, certainly in the narrative he sent to Jefferson. “[T]wo pistols fire off in the Governors Room: the servants being awakined by her, came in but too late to save him” [Grinder-Neelly 1809]. Much more time passes in the account provided by Alexander Wilson. “As soon as day broke and not before, the terror of the woman having permitted him to remain for two hours in this most deplorable situation, she sent two of her children to the barn, her husband not being home, to bring the servants” [Grinder-Wilson 1811]. Wilson was angry that Mrs. Grinder had done nothing to help the dying Lewis: “[I]t appears that this cooling element [water] was denied the dying man!” [Grinder-Wilson 1811]. Wilson was emphatic that Mrs. Grinder waited until daybreak and not before to rouse the servants.

Note that Lewis’s friend Alexander Wilson did not in any way, with any language―vague, implied, or direct―dispute Mrs. Grinder’s story that Lewis had committed suicide. That Wilson was angry during or after his interview with Priscilla Grinder is certain, but his anger was confined to her seeming indifference to the needs of a dying man.

Murderists are more incredulous than outraged by Mrs. Grinder’s apparent timidity. Fisher says, “[I]t takes a lot of credulity to believe that a frontier woman, used to hardship and living in a dangerous wilderness, on a trail infested with bandits, would wait until morning before going herself to the barn, or sending children, to summon the servants, when a mortally wounded man was crawling around and begging for help.”^[70]Fisher, Suicide or Murder?, p. 151. No matter what the motive, Bakeless concludes, “Lewis was left alone in agony all night or at least most of the night.”^[71]Bakeless, Partners in Discovery, p. 418.

At some point Mrs. Grinder summoned Pernier and Neelly’s servant, either herself or by way of her children. It seems likely that Wilson’s version of the aftermath of the shootings is the more accurate of the two, not only because it is longer and more detailed, but because Mrs. Grinder told the story to Wilson in a way that did not put herself in a very good light; an account unfavorable to the teller is almost always more credible than one that exonerates or aggrandizes the teller. If the servants came shortly after first light, they were able to see for themselves not necessarily what had happened, but the results of what had happened: “[T]hey found him lying on the bed; he uncovered his side and showed them where the bullet had entered; a piece of the forehead was blown off, and had exposed the brains, without having bled much” [Grinder-Wilson 1811].

Neelly’s report has less detail, but it does not in any way contradict the story Priscilla Grinder told Wilson sixteen months later: “[H]e had shot himself in the head with one pistol & a little below the Breast with the other” [Grinder-Neelly 1809]. Meriwether Lewis died of a gunshot wound to the head and another to the abdomen (“his side”). In neither of her contemporary reports did Mrs. Grinder speak of razor cuts or knife wounds. Neelly, who came upon the scene later in the morning of 11 October and had the opportunity to observe Lewis’s body, did not speak of knife or razor slashings, at least in his letter to Jefferson. The lurid account, provided by Gilbert Russell on 26 November 1811, that, after shooting himself, Lewis “got his razors from a port folio which happened to contain them and Seting up in his bed was found about day light, by one of the Servants, busily engaged in cutting himself from head to foot,”^[72]Quoted in Starrs and Gale, The Death of Meriwether Lewis, p. 252. finds no corroboration in the near-eyewitness accounts of Mrs. Grinder and James Neelly, or in Alexander Wilson’s account of his interview with the Grinders. Sensational stories tend to breed exaggeration, elaboration, and wild rumor. It cannot be ruled out that Lewis slashed his body “in the most cool desperate and Barbarian-like manner,”^[73]Quoted in Starrs and Gale, The Death of Meriwether Lewis, p. 252. as Russell put it in 1811, however. The apparent written source of the story was the Nashville Democratic Clarion, the newspaper that broke the Lewis suicide story on 20 October 1809. The account in the Frankfort Argus that William Clark read on 28 October 1809, was based on the article in the Nashville Clarion.^[74]See Danisi and Jackson, Meriwether Lewis, p. 302. The account in the Argus was based upon direct communication with Neelly. Because the Argus reported that Lewis, at the time of his death, “was cutting himself with a razor,”^[75]Quoted in Danisi and Jackson, Meriwether Lewis, p. 303. it is possible, even likely, that Neelly was the source of that information. It may be that Neelly remembered that detail, or learned it from Pernier, on his journey from Grinder’s Inn to Nashville. It may be that Neelly omitted that detail in his brief letter to Jefferson to spare the former president sensational details of the incident or because he realized that―whatever else was true―it was the pistol shots that killed Lewis. It may be that Neelly invented the slashings to make the story he told more melodramatic and sensational. It may be that a reporter for the Democratic Clarion embellished the story for effect. We have no way of knowing. Whatever their source, and irrespective of their accuracy, once the knife and razor cuts got into the informal network of frontier newspapers, it was impossible not to include that lurid detail of the incident. That’s the story as President Madison heard it. In a letter of 30 October 1809, to Jefferson, the president wrote, “[H]e had recourse to his Dirk with wch he mangled himself considerably. After all he lived till the next morning, with the utmost impatience for death.”^[76]Quoted in Danisi and Jackson, Meriwether Lewis, p. 304. What could be better than a dirk in a sensational story of frontier suicide? A dagger or a bare bodkin perhaps.

Lewis’s last words were also variously reported. Neelly had him saying to Pernier, “I have done the business my good Servant give me some water” [Grinder-Neelly 1809]. Wilson reported that Lewis “begged they would take his rifle and blow out his brains, and he would give them all the money he had in his trunk. He often said, ‘I am no coward; but I am so strong, so hard to die.’ He begged the servant not to be afraid of him, for that he would not hurt him” [Grinder-Wilson 1811].

Gilbert Russell, who was not at Grinder’s Inn on 11 October 1809, later reported, “He again beged for water, which was given him and so soon as he drank, he lay down and died with the declaration to the Boy [i.e., Pernier] that he had killed himself to deprive his enemies of the pleasure and honor of doing it.”^[77]Quoted in Starrs and Gale, The Death of Meriwether Lewis, p. 252. Neelly reported, “He [Pernier] gave him water, he survived but a short time” [Grinder-Neelly 1809].

Nobody doubts that Meriwether Lewis died on 11 October 1809, sometime after first light, that he died primarily and perhaps exclusively of gunshot wounds, that he was―like most victims of gunshot wounds―exceptionally thirsty in the last hours or minutes of his life, and that he lived long enough to speak to his servant Pernier and others. Wilson’s direct quotation, derived from Mrs. Grinder, “I am no coward; but I am so strong, so hard to die” [Wilson-Grinder 1811], has the ring of truth. It echoes something Lewis wrote on 11 May 1805, just inside today’s Montana when the expedition recognized for the first time the profound life force of the grizzly bear: “[T]hese bear being so hard to die reather intimedates us all; I must confess that I do not like the gentlemen and had reather fight two Indians than one bear.”^[78]JLCE, IV:141. It is hard to know how Mrs. Grinder or Wilson would have been able to invent words that so closely resonated with Lewis’s own particular phraseology.^[79]Bakeless, Partners in Discovery, p. 419: “The last words must be an exact quotation—they are the very words Lewis applies to a wounded grizzly in the Journals.”

So Governor Meriwether Lewis died sometime after sunup on Wednesday, 11 October 1809. He was thirty-five years old. He was 738 miles from Washington, DC. He was 618 miles from Locust Hill and Monticello. He was 1,905 miles from the source of the “mighty & heretofore deemed endless Missouri” River.^[80]JLCE, V:74. Most important of all he was 223 miles from his friend and protector William Clark, who spent the night somewhere near Hardinsburg or Radcliffe, Kentucky.

James Neelly, who had stayed behind to round up the stray horses, apparently camped out on the night of 10–11 October somewhere not far from Grinder’s Inn. When he arrived at the inn on the morning of 11 October, Lewis was dead. “I came up some time after, & had him as decently Buried as I could in that place” [Neelly 1809].^[81]At this point, Neelly’s testimony becomes his own. See Jackson, Letters, pp. 467-468. Unfortunately, Neelly does not supply more detail about matters of great importance to us: the disposition of the corpse, including the exact placement of the bullet wounds and any other evidence of violence; the location and condition of Lewis’s pistols; the location of the gunpowder canister Lewis had inquired about the previous evening; the location of the grave, the depth, and grave markings; and whether Lewis was buried in his clothes or in some other form of shroud.^[82]Dillon, Meriwether Lewis, p. 336: “It is not known . . . whether he examined the body for powder burns, which would have strongly suggested suicide; whether he even examined the … Continue reading When Wilson visited Grinder’s Inn early in 1811, he reported, “He lies buried close by the common path, with a few loose rails thrown over his grave. I gave Grinder [Robert, not Priscilla] money to put a post fence round it to shelter it from the hogs, and from the wolves; and he gave me his written promise he would do it” [Wilson 1811].

Danisi and Jackson attempt to put physical closure on the incident: “Most accounts discreetly overlook what those secondary victims of the tragedy had to do. There was a grim search for enough boards to cobble together a crude box. The shredded, blood-crusted clothing had to be removed, the wounded body washed, and the corpse redressed in something suitable for a tolerable burial. That was just what frontier countrymen of the period would have done for a deceased relative or neighbor.”^[83]Danisi and Jackson, Meriwether Lewis, pp. 301-302.

So far as we know, no one witnessed the death of Meriwether Lewis. Lewis’s servant Pernier was sleeping in a barn or stable approximately 200 yards from the cabin in which the shooting occurred. So was Neelly’s servant. If Mrs. Grinder is to be believed, the servants apparently did not hear the gunshots. Mrs. Grinder was close at hand, across the breezeway, trying to sleep in the other cabin about fifteen feet away, but she did not claim to witness the gunshots. James Neelly was camping somewhere near, but not at Grinder’s Inn. Priscilla Grinder was an ear-witness to the shooting. She heard the shots, and she heard someone fall heavily to the floor of the other cabin. She claimed to have seen Lewis staggering around in the vicinity of the inn shortly after the shooting. In none of the accounts we have did she claim to have seen the body after Lewis’s death, though she almost certainly did. Nor is it clear from the accounts we have whether she was present in the room at the time of Lewis’s death. Probably she was.

The story of Lewis’s death works its way out from whatever actually happened at Grinder’s Inn through a handful of individuals, not one of whom is regarded as an unimpeachable witness. Everyone agrees that something happened at Grinder’s Inn at about 3 A.M.on 11 October 1809. Priscilla Grinder was as close to an eyewitness as exists in this troubled story, but she did not actually see what transpired. The next two to learn what happened and see the result were Lewis’s servant Pernier and Neelly’s unnamed servant. They seem to have had an exchange of words with the dying Lewis, who was still alive when they were summoned to the scene. When James Neelly rode up sometime later in the morning of 22 October, Priscilla Grinder told him what she believed―or wanted him to believe―had happened. Neelly accepted her account and supervised the burial of Governor Lewis, though probably the physical labor was performed by black men. Neelly wrote to former president Jefferson on 18 October 1809, one week after Lewis’s violent death. John Bakeless has written, “The entire suicide story, therefore, depends entirely on what the people at Grinder’s Stand that night told Neeley [sic] the next day, with some possible confirmation from Lewis’s two servants.”^[84]Bakeless, Partners in Discovery, p. 415. Only one was Lewis’s servant.

Vardis Fisher has called Neelly’s letter to Jefferson “one of the most unsatisfactory documents in all of history.”^[85]Fisher, Suicide or Murder?, p. 128. That is something of an exaggeration. Neelly’s letter does not tell us all we would like to know about the death of Lewis, but it told Jefferson all he needed to know, and in clear terms. Neelly’s first sentence got right to the point: “It is with extreme pain I have to inform you of the death of His Excellency Meriwether Lewis, Governor of upper Louisiana who died on the morning of the 11th Instant and I am Sorry to Say by Suicide.”^[86]Jackson, Letters, p. 467. What could be more clear and concise than this? Neelly went on to provide a few details. He also accounted for Lewis’s trunks and papers, and asked the former president where they should be sent. That would have been one of Jefferson’s primary concerns. Indeed, Jefferson would have regarded the security of Lewis’s papers as more important at the time than further details about the shooting. Like Clark, Jefferson’s next thought after absorbing the terrible news of Lewis’s death would have been, as Clark put it, “[W]hat will be the Consequence? what will become of my his paprs?”^[87]Holmberg, Dear Brother, p. 218.

The key player in this sad story was Priscilla Grinder. Dee Brown has called her “history’s sole source for the last hours of Meriwether Lewis’s life.”^[88]Dee Brown, “What Really Happened to Meriwether Lewis?” in Columbia Magazine, Winter 1988. Vol. 1, #4. Unfortunately, neither Mrs. Grinder nor Pernier nor Neelly’s servant ever wrote a first-person account of Lewis’s death, so far as we know.^[89]Dillon, Meriwether Lewis, p. 337: “But not one word, alas, of Jefferson’s conversation with the Creole [Pernier] has come down to us. Certainly, however, Pernia confirmed Neelly’s … Continue reading Neelly was not an eyewitness. His account of the death of Lewis was based primarily on the testimony of Mrs. Grinder, to a certain degree on the testimony of Pernier and his own servant, and partly on his own direct observation of the desperate tableau that awaited him at Grinder’s Inn when he arrived on the morning of 11 October.

The key documents pertaining to the death of Lewis are, in descending order, Priscilla Grinder’s account as told by Neelly in his 18 October 1809, letter to former president Jefferson; Alexander Wilson’s account of his interview with Mrs. Grinder, dated 18 May 1811; and three documents created by Gilbert Russell. These documents included two letters to Jefferson, dated 4 January 1810, and 31 January 1810, and the affidavit or deposition he gave on 26 November 1811. Although Russell was not at or near Grinder’s Inn on 1-–11 October 1809, he had an opportunity to observe Lewis at Fort Pickering for two full weeks between 15 September and 29 September 1809. Because Russell felt the need to place Lewis under friendly arrest at Fort Pickering, and because he reported that Lewis had twice attempted to commit suicide on the Mississippi River ride between St. Louis and today’s Memphis, his testimony represents an essential part of the story.

An incident for which there was no known eyewitness can never be entirely cleared of mystery.

Much has been made of Robert Grinder’s absence on the night of the shooting, but such things happen. Grinder had no way of knowing that Lewis was approaching his hostelry. His absence does not automatically make him a suspect in the case. The murderists find Priscilla Grinder’s fear and trembling, her delay in rousing Lewis’s attendants, deeply suspicious; but there is no adequate reason to discredit her testimony merely because she was paralyzed by fear after the shooting and waited until daylight to send for help. Such things happen. How many historians have been awakened in the middle of a dark night in the middle of nowhere by a shooting incident in their family’s private quarters? Murderists find Neelly’s absence at the time of the shooting suspicious, particularly because he turned up so soon after Lewis’s death on the morning of 11 October. On that score, President Madison’s explanation is as good as any: “As soon as they had passed the Tennessee [River], he [Lewis] took advantage of the neglect of his companion [Neelly], who had not secured his arms, to put an end to himself.”^[90]Quoted in Danisi and Jackson, Meriwether Lewis, pp. 303-304. In other words, the separation of Neelly and Lewis was not the work of Neelly but of Lewis, who insisted on riding ahead to the first white settlement on the Natchez Trace while Neelly remained behind to scour up the stray horses.

Unfortunately, as in virtually all cases of violent death, none of the core players can be regarded as entirely reliable. Mrs. Grinder changed her story over time. By 1839, thirty years after the incident, in her last known account of the death of Lewis, she stated that, “About dark two or three other men rode up and called for lodging. Mr. Lewis immediately drew a brace of pistols, stepped towards them and challenged them to fight a duel. They not liking this salutation, rode on to the next house, five miles.”^[91]Quoted in Fisher, Suicide or Murder?, p. 155. Even Vardis Fisher, who was determined to undermine the credibility of any suicide witness, dismissed the 1839 account as preposterous. “That Lewis rushed out and challenged two or three men to a duel merely because they asked for lodgings is so fantastically improbable that we must assume either that Mrs. Grinder invented it to support her story of derangement, or got Lewis mixed up with another lodger on another occasion.”^[92]Fisher, Suicide or Murder, pp. 155-156.

James Neelly was not the villainous character most murderists make him out to be, but he did appropriate a number of Lewis’s personal objects at the time of Lewis’s death. He “returned” a few of them only when Lewis’s brother John Marks directly confronted Neelly’s wife in Nashville in January 1812, and apparently never returned some of Lewis’s personal effects to his family. He had the effrontery to make a financial claim against Lewis’s estate, in spite of his failure to protect the safety of the distinguished man he had agreed to escort. He may also have pocketed the cash Lewis was carrying on his last journey. Neelly’s mismanagement of Lewis’s drinking problem between Fort Pickering and Grinder’s Inn earned him the wrath of Gilbert Russell, who told Jefferson that Neelly was essentially responsible for Lewis’s death: “[T]his Agt. being extremely fond of liquor, instead of preventing the Govr from drinking or keeping him under any restraint advised him to it & from every thing I can learn gave the man every chance to seek an opportunity to destroy himself.”^[93]Quoted in Starrs and Gale, The Death of Meriwether Lewis, p. 246. Neelly was unceremoniously dismissed from his post as US Indian agent in 1812, a fact that murderists seldom fail to cite in their indictment of his character. In retrospect, Gilbert Russell believed that almost anyone else would have been a more responsible chaperon of Lewis than Neelly. If Meriwether Lewis was murdered at Grinder’s Inn, Priscilla Grinder was either one of the conspirators, or―after the killer(s) fled―she wrongly concluded that Lewis had killed himself. If she had a role in the murder, James Neelly was either a fellow conspirator, or he was a man so simple-minded that he accepted her suicide story without skepticism when he rode up later that morning. These notions frankly strain credulity. If Neelly and Mrs. Grinder were co-conspirators, they either committed the crime without Pernier and Neelly’s servant knowing what they had done, or they included the servants in the conspiracy, or they intimidated them into lifelong silence about what actually transpired at Grinder’s Inn. By the time Pernier reached Thomas Jefferson later that fall, he was sufficiently far away from Neelly that he would have felt secure in telling Jefferson the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

The two most important men in Lewis’s life, Thomas Jefferson and William Clark, had the same reaction to the news. They were shocked, but they were not surprised. Jefferson could not have been more categorical if he tried. In a public account of the life of Lewis, Jefferson wrote, “About 3. oclock in the night he did the deed which plunged his friends into affliction and deprived his country of one of her most valued citizens.”^[94]Jackson, Letters, p. 592. William Clark, learning of Lewis’s suicide from a frontier newspaper, wrote, “[I]t Says that Govr. Lewis killed himself by Cutting his Throat with a Knife, on his way between the Chickaw Saw Bluffs and nashville, I fear this report has too much truth, tho’ hope it may have no foundation―my reasons for thinking it possible is founded on the letter which I recved from him at your house, in that letter he Says he had Some intintion of going thro’ by land. . . . I fear O! I fear the waight of his mind has over come him, what will be the Consequence? what will become of my his paprs?”^[95]Quoted in Holmberg, Dear Brother, pp. 216-218. Notice that Clark did not question the suicide. What he sought was confirmation that Lewis had changed his plans and traveled overland towards Nashville.

Neither Jefferson nor Clark rejected the suicide story as preposterous or even unlikely. That is exceedingly significant. If either of them had the slightest doubt, they would have expressed their resistance to the news in one way or another. If Clark had felt there was any possibility that Lewis had been murdered, if he had sensed anything suspect in the stories radiating out from Nashville, he would have gone to Grinder’s Inn himself to investigate. It is, in fact, more than a little odd that he never in the course of his long life made the pilgrimage to Lewis’s lonely grave. Perhaps he could not bear to visit the scene of such desperation. Perhaps he was ashamed of his friend, or ashamed of himself for not doing more to help Lewis during his last struggle.

The two most important men in Lewis’s life accepted the suicide story because it rang true―it squared with what they knew about the troubled soul of Meriwether Lewis; how completely he embodied the external strains and challenges of his life; how sensitive he was to criticism; how hard he was on himself; how dramatic and even melodramatic he tended to be; and how self-punishing he was when he felt that he was not meeting his own or the world’s expectations. For Clark, Lewis’s suicide made sense in light of the last letter he received from Lewis, in light of his last meeting with Lewis on 25 August 1809, in St. Louis, after which Clark confessed that “I have not Spent Such a Day as yesterday fer maney years . . . if his mind had been at ease I Should have parted Cherefully.”^[96]Quoted in Holmberg, Dear Brother, p. 210. That that Meriwether Lewis might have taken his own life did not surprise William Clark, however deeply he grieved for his fallen friend. For Jefferson, Lewis’s suicide made sense given Lewis’s bewildering silence in the last fifteen months, his failure to write the book, and the difficulties he had put himself in with the War Department in Washington. Jefferson remembered observing “sensible depressions of mind”^[97]Jackson, Letters, p. 592. during the White House years, and he was aware of the “constitutional source”^[98]Jackson, Letters, p. 592. from which they sprang in both branches of the Lewis family.(These great men―both individuals of extraordinary integrity―accepted Lewis’s suicide. They had more heart and soul invested in Meriwether Lewis than any historian can muster two centuries after the fact. If Jefferson and Clark found Lewis’s suicide all too plausible, how is that we have such trouble accepting it? If they accepted the story without protest, how can a modern biographer declare, “If there is such a person as the anti-suicide type, it was Meriwether Lewis. By temperament, he was a fighter, not a quitter. Much has been made of his introspection. . . . Sensitive he was; neurotic he was not. Lewis was one of the most positive personalities in American history”?^[99]Dillon, Meriwether Lewis, p. 344. Doubting Neelly and Mrs. Grinder is a painless enterprise, even if it is unfair. Doubting Thomas Jefferson and William Clark requires amazing temerity. Clark and Jefferson did not believe that Lewis was the “anti-suicide type.” Just the reverse.

The only close friend of Lewis’s who visited the gravesite was Alexander Wilson, the American ornithologist whom Lewis met in 1807 after returning from the great journey. Wilson made his pilgrimage to Grinder’s Inn in the spring of 1811. He loved Lewis. After his interview with the Grinders, he stated, “I left this place in a very melancholy mood, which was not much allayed by the prospect of the gloomy and savage wilderness which I was just entering alone.”^[100]Quoted in Guice, By His Own Hand, p. 158. Wilson subsequently wrote a remarkable poem about Lewis’s disintegration and demise. Wilson, like Jefferson and Clark, was an unambivalent suicidist.

Wilson was no patsy. In his letter to Alexander Lawson, 28 May 1811, he expressed anger at Priscilla Grinder’s failure to succor Lewis as he lay dying on 11 October. He had sternly instructed Robert Grinder to take something like adequate care of the late governor’s grave, made him sign a letter promising to do so, and sealed the contract with an advance payment of cash. Wilson interviewed Priscilla Grinder. He recorded her story in considerable detail. It does not vary in any significant way from James Neelly’s more cursory account of Lewis’s death. Danisi and Jackson, though they are not quite suicidists and emphatically not murderists, rightly acknowledge the credibility of Wilson’s report and the unvarnished authenticity of Mrs. Grinder’s narrative. “His interview with Mrs. Grinder recovered the best first-person account of the fatal night. It seems unlikely that the authenticity of the vivid details that he took down were colored by sympathy or retelling.”^[101]Danisi and Jackson, Meriwether Lewis, p. 343.

Wilson was Lewis’s friend and advocate. If he had felt the slightest doubt about the veracity of Mrs. Grinder’s story, if he had suspected that she had anything to hide or was omitting any material facts of the case, he would have challenged her directly or at least written of his suspicions and frustrations when he had gotten clear of the grumpy Robert Grinder and Grinder’s Inn. His moving account of the death of Lewis accepts the suicide story unhesitatingly. So does his poem.

These would seem to be insuperable problems for the murderists. Thomas Jefferson, patron and father figure to Lewis, was publicly certain it was suicide. William Clark, partner in discovery and closest friend, was unhesitatingly convinced it was suicide. Alexander Wilson, the scientific friend who undertook a pilgrimage to the lonely grave and interviewed the woman who was the nearest thing we have to an eyewitness, was entirely convinced it was suicide. None of them ever wrote a single sentence giving Lewis’s death the benefit of the doubt or suggesting any possibility of an alternative theory of his death.

Strangely, the enormous weight of these three men’s testimony has not prevented some historians from preferring that he was murdered at Grinder’s Inn.

Melodramatically, Lewis’s distinguished biographer Richard Dillon wrote, “Was Meriwether Lewis murdered? Yes. Is there proof of his murder? No. Could Lewis’s death have been a suicide? Yes. Not only because the analysts today will insist that anyone is capable of self-destruction, given the right set of circumstances, even a man of courage like Lewis, but because the Governor was fatigued, depressed, sick and, at times, delirious . . . . And, where there was no proof of murder, there was evidence’ of suicide at Grinder’s Stand.”^[102]Dillon, Meriwether Lewis, p. 344. Consider the logic of this. There was evidence of suicide, there was no proof of murder, the governor was fatigued, depressed, sick and, at times, delirious, but “Was Meriwether Lewis murdered? Yes.” It is hard to imagine historiography more colored by wishful thinking than this.

Given all that he conceded in his analysis, it would seem that Dillon, an outstanding historian and biographer, would be forced by his own analysis to pronounce Lewis’s death a suicide, but he concluded, “If there is such a person as the anti-suicide type, it was Meriwether Lewis. By temperament, he was a fighter, not a quitter.”^[103]Dillon, Meriwether Lewis, p. 344.

Dillon’s suspects include Pernier (perhaps to recover “the money which his master owed him”), Neelly’s servant (“bribed or terrified into lasting silence, or an accomplice”), Neelly (“certainly stole the Governor’s rifle, horse, pistols, dagger, and pipe-tomahawk”), the Grinders (“the inn-keeper, lurking in the woods, or his hard-bitten woman”), possibly even Gilbert Russell (“no paragon of virtue”).^[104]Dillon, Meriwether Lewis, p. 345-347. In the end, having sifted the evidence against all of these individuals, Dillon opts for someone else, however: “His assassin, I am convinced, was either an unknown land pirate of the ilk of the Harpe brothers of bloody Natchez notoriety, or the mysterious Runnion, suspected by Whiteside’s coroner’s jury because his moccasin tracks and the impression of the butt of his unusual rifle were found in the dirt near Lewis’s cabin.”^[105]Dillon, Meriwether Lewis, p. 348. “Is there proof of his murder? No.”

Although the great Lewis and Clark editor Elliott Coues was inclined to vote for murder, he freely admitted that “the fragmentary evidence which has come down to us [indicating murder], moreover, does not hang together well.”^[106]Coues, The History of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, p. lvi. He freely acknowledged that one of the principal problems for the murder theory was Jefferson’s public declaration that Lewis took his own life. The murder theory is “offset,” Coues admitted, “by the unqualified statements of Mr. Jefferson, a wary and astute man of the world, accustomed to weigh his words well; one who must have been satisfied in his own mind that he had the facts of a case beyond his personal knowledge; and one who had every imaginable reason―personal, official, or other―to put the matter in the most favorable light.”^[107]Coues, The History of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, p. lvii. Coues admitted that the principal reason to wish it were murder is “to clear so great a name from so grave an imputation.”^[108]Coues, The History of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, p. lvi. Fisher, Suicide or Murder?, p. 251, acknowledges that Coues and Olin D. Wheeler “found themselves unable to reach a … Continue reading That would seem to be the essential motive of the majority of murderists.

Dr. Eldon Chuinard rejected suicide on the basis of forensics. A man shooting himself with .69 caliber bullets is not going to have the strength to wander about the yard and breezeway of Grinder’s Inn. “The second shot,” Chuinard wrote, “would be expected to have killed Lewis instantly, or have disabled him . . . What do the supporters of suicide think that this second shot would have done to the heart, lungs, aorta and/or intestines? Certainly Lewis would have been in dire shock and soon have bled to death or perhaps paralyzed from spinal cord injury.”^[109]Quoted in Peck, Or Perish in the Attempt, p. 293.

More recently, Dr. David Peck has disputed Chuinard’s conclusion. The internal trauma and bleeding “could have definitely gone on for two hours prior to his death, not causing the instant death’ that Dr. Chuinard believes it would have,”^[110]Peck, Or Perish in the Attempt, p. 293. Peck wrote.

Peck believes Lewis was suffering from the milder of the two forms of malaria. He would not have been able to travel if he had been suffering from the more severe strain which caused low blood sugar, anemia, and kidney failure, causing the victim to die “within days.”^[111]Peck, Or Perish in the Attempt, p. 294. He also doubts that the milder form of malaria would have caused him to commit suicide. “I find it difficult to imagine that symptoms of fever, chills, headache, and nausea he had experienced previously would have caused Lewis to take his own life at this time.”^[112]Peck, Or Perish in the Attempt, p. 295. Peck believes it is more likely that Lewis’s suicide was brought on by a combination of the malaria, opium addiction, alcoholism, and “other psychological problems.”^[113]Peck, Or Perish in the Attempt, p. 295.

David Lavender, like Stephen Ambrose, was certain that Lewis committed suicide. “There was no doubt in Jefferson’s mind―or in Clark’s who heard the news in Louisville while on another trip East with Julia and their eldest son, the infant Meriwether Lewis Clark―that the death was suicide and not murder, a theory that keeps insistently cropping up to explain, in more palatable form, the death of a national hero.”^[114]Lavender, The Way to the Western Sea, p. 385. For Lavender, the murder theory is not based on evidence, but on the psychology of the American public. Suicide is a shameful way for a national hero to die. Murder is “more palatable,” because would enable us to believe Lewis was mentally stable at the time of his death.

The list of contemporaries who believed that Lewis committed suicide is monumental: Thomas Jefferson, William Clark, Alexander Wilson, Gilbert Russell, James Neelly, John Pernier, Priscilla Grinder, John Brahan, and the anonymous friend who wrote Lewis’s obituary.^[115]For the obituary, see Danisi and Jackson, Meriwether Lewis, p. 329. The list of contemporaries who believed that Lewis was murdered is . . . well, entirely blank, with the possible exception of Lewis’ mother Lucy Marks. The list of twentieth century authors who are convinced that Lewis committed suicide is enough to daunt the courage of any murderist: Donald Jackson, Gary Moulton, James Ronda, James Holmberg, Kay Redfield Jamison, Stephen Ambrose, Thomas Slaughter, David Lavender, Stephen Dow Beckham, M.R. Montgomery, Harry Fritz, David Freeman Hawke, David Nicandri, Paul Cutright, Jonathan Daniels, Dayton Duncan, William Foley, Landon Jones, Stephenie Ambrose Tubbs, Carolyn Gilman, Larry Morris, Dawson Phelps, David Peck, and a host of others.

The list of contemporary murderists is also impressive: John Guice, Richard Dillon, Elliott Coues (?), Reuben Gold Thwaites, John Bakeless, Bernard DeVoto, Vardis Fisher, Eldon Chuinard, Olin D. Wheeler, Kira Gale, and James Starrs.^[116]Coues, Thwaites, and DeVoto, it must be acknowledged, were half-hearted murderists, at best. Each of them preferred murder but was aware that Lewis might well have killed himself. None was willing to … Continue reading

John Bakeless, though he was a murder advocate, acknowledged, “The evidence for murder is not very strong, and the stories from Fort Pickering strongly suggest suicide, but none of the evidence is really conclusive.”^[117]Bakeless, Partners in Discovery, p. 423.

The leading exponent of the murder position is John Guice, an emeritus professor of history at the University of Southern Mississippi and an expert on the history of the Natchez Trace. He has written and lectured extensively on this subject. In the endless debate over the death of Meriwether Lewis, Guice and the murderists have one enormous advantage; it is impossible to refute their main assertion. Guice has written, “No one knows whether or not Meriwether Lewis committed suicide. No one witnessed the firing of the two .69 calibre pistol balls that caused the fatal wounds.”^[118]Guice, By His Own Hand, p. 74.

Guice has summarized the murderist position in a delightful and at times playful thirty-two-page essay, “Why Not Homicide?” in By His Own Hand? The Mysterious Death of Meriwether Lewis. Guice’s historiography―at least in this essay―is remarkable and perplexing, to say the least. He spends a full thirty pages attempting to punch holes in the suicide theory, and just a page and a half making the case that Lewis might have been murdered. By my count, Guice offers forty arguments against suicide. (See footnote)^[119]1. There were no eyewitnesses; 2. Too much is made of Lewis’s state of mind during his last days in St. Louis; 3. He was busier, less idle and dissipated in Philadelphia than historians have … Continue reading The essence of his argument is twofold: first, that the “evidence” for suicide is not nearly as compelling as it has been made to appear, and almost every piece of suicide “evidence” is capable of being read another way; second, because it is impossible to know definitively that Lewis committed suicide, historians should be much more even handed and agnostic about this sensitive and important question. Guice argues that the authority of three men has unfairly distorted the debate: Dawson Phelps, who wrote an influential article for the William and Mary Quarterly in 1956; Donald Jackson, whose magisterial Letters of the Lewis and Clark Expedition (1978) has made him seem like the final authority on Lewis and Clark questions; and Stephen Ambrose, whose Undaunted Courage (1996) has sold “millions of copies and who did far more than any other single writer to convince Americans that Lewis killed himself.”^[120]Guice, By His Own Hand?, p. 100. Guice argues that if historians were more rigorous and less impressionable―less in the thrall of Ambrose and Jackson―they would admit the suicide-murder debate is far from resolved. He suggests that responsible historical analysis must acknowledge, at the very least, that in the absence of an eyewitness, we can never be 100 percent sure that Lewis took his own life. In that regard, Guice has performed an important service to Lewis and Clark studies.

John Guice makes many useful points in his essay. He argues that there is no good reason to conclude that Lewis was depressed after the expedition merely because he was dilatory in getting to St. Louis. Not only did Lewis make considerable progress on the publication project in the nation’s intellectual capital, Philadelphia, in 1807, but he got a well-deserved vacation in which he “cavorted with the girls.”^[121]Guice, By His Own Hand?, p. 77. Guice also rightly contextualizes Lewis’s drinking habits. Heavy drinking in the early national period was not unusual. W.J. Rorabaugh’s The Alcoholic Republic: An American Tradition is a useful study of the heavy consumption that was commonplace on the American frontier. Guice concludes, “The amount of whiskey drunk on the southern frontier seems astronomical by modern standards.”^[122]Guice, By His Own Hand?, p. 78.

Guice also insists that while Lewis’s administrative difficulties in St. Louis were serious and to him exasperating, they were not particularly unusual on the western frontier in that era. US government functionaries in and out of the army routinely had trouble getting their vouchers honored by faraway Washington bureaucrats. As Danisi and Jackson convincingly prove, Lewis was busy, productive, and professionally engaged throughout his time in St. Louis, in spite of the backbiting insubordination of his assistant Frederick Bates, in spite of the manifold complexity of land titles and social and legal authority in the period of transition between European colonial administration of Louisiana and the regimen that the new sovereign, the United States, was attempting to impose on an outspoken and unruly population far from the national capital.^[123]Danisi and Jackson, Meriwether Lewis, pp. 213-251.

Guice joins a chorus of writers, best represented by the late Stephen Ambrose, in arguing that “It would have been utterly unrealistic” for President Jefferson to believe that Lewis could administer the raw new territory and, at the same time, write a multivolume account of his travels. It is far from clear, Guice argues, that Lewis felt any significant guilt or despondency in not having completed the book.^[124]Guice, By His Own Hand?, p. 79.

Guice is much less convincing when he faults Gilbert Russell for not providing details about Lewis’s two alleged suicide attempts on board the boat that brought him from St. Louis to Fort Pickering. Guice implies that Russell’s failure to specify the nature of the suicide attempts undermines his credibility. Guice fantasizes that Lewis might simply have lost his balance and fallen (twice?) from the deck of the ship “due to wind and current on one of the world’s greatest rivers.”^[125]Guice, By His Own Hand?, p. 81. This is not a convincing argument. Nor does Guice make a convincing argument that Russell’s affidavit of 26 November 1811, is inauthentic.^[126]Guice, By His Own Hand?, p. 83.

Guice rightly argues that Lewis’s letter to President Madison from Fort Pickering, dated 16 September 1809, is the work of a man essentially in control of his rational faculties (see above, first three paragraphs of Part IV). The fact that the extant copy of the letter is riddled with corrections and deletions is not necessarily evidence that Lewis was deranged. It may have been a draft of the letter Lewis actually sent. He was writing to the president of the United States at a moment when his entire future was at stake. Lewis was physically ill. The document we have is a mess. But the letter is anything but incoherent.^[127]Guice, By His Own Hand?, p. 82.

Guice spends more time trying to puncture peripheral arguments for suicide than analyzing the facts of 10–11 October themselves. In the course of his thirty-two-page essay, he is unable to shake the credibility of Priscilla Grinder, the key “witness” in the story. The best he can do is raise the possibility that Mrs. Grinder claimed, after the shots were fired, she saw more than would actually have been possible on a moonless night. His attempts to weaken the authority of Jefferson’s and Clark’s immediate and lifelong acceptance of the suicide story are unconvincing. He joins Vardis Fisher in arguing that because Jefferson’s integrity (on some issues) has been called into question by biographers and historians, the former president’s declaration that Lewis committed suicide should not be accorded automatic credibility. Jefferson apparently anticipated Guice’s skepticism. At the end of his biographical sketch of Lewis, he wrote, “To this melancholy close of the life of one whom posterity will declare not to have lived in vain I have only to add that all facts I have stated are either known to myself, or communicated by his family or others for whose truth I have no hesitation to make [myself] responsible.”^[128]Jackson, Letters, p. 593. One of those “others” was John Pernier, who traveled to Monticello after Lewis’s death to provide a personal report to Jefferson. Guice is even weaker on Clark’s “I fear O! I fear” letter to his brother Jonathan dated 28 October 1809. If Clark really believed Lewis committed suicide, he argues, why didn’t he write more about Lewis’s death during the remaining nineteen years of his life?^[129]Guice, By His Own Hand?, p. 87. This argument is essentially incoherent. If Theodore Roosevelt really believed that his first wife died on Valentine’s Day 1884, why did he steadfastly refuse to talk or write about her for the rest of his life?

Guice is at his best when he calls for skepticism and agnosticism, at his worst when he publishes absurdities in the hope of nibbling the opposition to death. Even so, it is possible to grant many of Guice’s arguments without joining him in the conclusion that the suicide theory is weak or baseless. The sum total of Guice’s argument is this: We cannot prove Lewis committed suicide. He might have been murdered. Therefore he was murdered.

Guice gives the overwhelming bulk of his energy to the mission of weakening the suicide theory. Only in the last page and a half of his essay does he actually make the case for murder, and then rather half-heartedly. First he nominates as potential assailants James Neelly, John Pernier, and Robert Grinder, but without providing any details or even suggesting motives. Then he cites one of his university students who irresponsibly suggested that Lewis made sexual advances towards Priscilla Grinder, after which she shot him dead. Next he offers two vague indictments of the notorious James Wilkinson. In the first, Wilkinson, a spy and a traitor, wanted Lewis dead (no motive provided) and somehow convinced Lewis’s servant Pernier to do the wet work. In the second, Jefferson helped Wilkinson cover up the crime.^[130]Guice, By His Own Hand?, p. 102. At least it can be said that not even Guice is convinced by the wild argument that Jefferson was part of the conspiracy. Finally, in the last sentence of the essay, Guice provides his entire case for murder. I quote John Guice’s murder theory in its entirety: “A perfect target for outlaws, Lewis was probably their victim.”^[131]Guice, By His Own Hand?, p. 102. That, and nothing more.

As Hamlet said, “Is this a prologue, or a posy of a ring?”^[132]Hamlet, III.ii.p. 143.

In addition to their insistence that Lewis’s death is too mysterious to declare a suicide, the murderists advance six principal arguments. The review that follows is not meant to be an endorsement.

First, the problem of forensics. How could a master marksman bungle his suicide? Assuming that Lewis was using .69 caliber pistols, how could he miss with the first shot? Lewis was a superb marksman, so the argument goes, and if he wanted to blow his brains out he would surely have been able to do so. Even if we accept that somehow the first shot miscarried and removed a portion of his skull without killing him, what followed, according to the evidence we have, strains credibility. How could a man suffering from a severe head wound have the capacity to shoot himself a second time? After he shot himself in the head, the murderists argue, he would have been unable to regroup and shoot himself in the side. Assuming he was―somehow―able to shoot himself in the side, he would have died more or less immediately. If somehow he lived on after the second shot, he would not have had the strength to crawl about the premises and the yard at Grinder’s Inn. If we really want to know the truth, why not exhume the body and subject Lewis’s remains to rigorous twenty-first century forensic analysis? Murderists claim that the suicidists are hiding behind the protocols of the National Park Service, because they know that exhumation would confirm that Lewis was murdered.

Second, the problem of mixed messages. Why would a suicidal man tell Amos Stoddard that he intended to return to St. Louis? Why would Lewis tell Gilbert Russell he intended to go to Philadelphia to finish his book if he planned to kill himself? Why would a suicidal man make plans to move his mother to Missouri? Why would Clark say he reckoned Lewis would return with flying colors if he knew Lewis was in steep decline?

Third, the problem of narrative inconsistency. What should we make of the conflicting testimony of Priscilla Grinder in the years (decades) after Lewis’s death? Was she alone or wasn’t she? Did she see Lewis lurching around on a moonless night, or did she make that up? If Lewis slashed himself with a knife or razor, why didn’t Neelly mention that in his letter to Jefferson? Were there other travelers at or near the inn that night? What actual evidence do we have that Lewis tried twice to kill himself on the journey from St. Louis to Fort Pickering? Are Russell’s letters authentic?

Fourth, the problem of credibility. How can we trust Major Neelly if he stole some of Lewis’s personal items and refused to return a few of them to the Lewis family after his death? How can we trust the Grinders? All three of them were perfect strangers to Meriwether Lewis. All three are shadowy figures who would not merit even a footnote in history were it not for their association with Lewis at the worst moment of his extraordinary life. They may have been speaking the truth as they knew it, but none of them actually witnessed the death of Lewis, unless they were his assassins or co-conspirators with his assassins, in which case their testimony would, of course, be tainted. If Jefferson had an adulterous affair with Maria Cosway and tried to seduce his friend John Walker’s wife, how can we trust him as a biographer of Lewis? Isn’t there some evidence that Clark may have changed his mind later in life?

Fifth, the problem of character. Lewis had no adequate reason to kill himself. “If there is such a person as the anti-suicide type, it was Meriwether Lewis.”^[133]Dillon, Meriwether Lewis, p. 344. All the alleged symptoms of Lewis’s mental instability, gleaned both from the journey itself and from the years after his return, are deliberately taken out of context and heaped together to create the portrait of a neurotic and suicidal man. Guice wrote, “Interpretation of those . . . [incidents] as evidence of suicidal tendencies is farfetched, to say the least, unless one starts with the premise of suicide . . . . Where is the hard evidence that Lewis suffered from depression?”^[134]Guice, By His Own Hand?, pp. 88, 89.

Sixth, the problem of the tenacity of the murder theory. It is not true, as the suicidists claim, that the murder theory didn’t spring up until the mid-nineteenth century. Local folks from the Hohenwald have always suspected the suicide story. Although the written records are lost, oral tradition tells us of inquests, widespread suspicion of Robert Grinder, the possibility of bandits whose names are preserved, the rumor that Lewis had a map of a gold mine he had discovered in Montana, and much more. The 1848 Monument Committee in Tennessee would not have declared, without evidence, “The impression has long prevailed that under the influence of disease of body and mind Governor Lewis perished by his own hands. It seems to be more probable that he died by the hands of an assassin.”^[135]Quoted in Guice, By His Own Hand?, p. 95. Where there is smoke, there’s fire. Oral tradition that points towards murder circulated immediately after the crime, and it continues to percolate in rural Tennessee in the twenty-first century.

The most recent contribution to the debate has been offered by Thomas Danisi and John Jackson in their 2009 administrative biography of Meriwether Lewis. Their view is that Lewis was suffering from an extremely severe form of malaria in the last weeks of his life. After twice attempting to kill himself on the river journey between St. Louis and Fort Pickering, Lewis did in fact take his own life at Grinder’s Inn. His death was not suicide in the manner of a desperate or deranged man taking his own life, but an extreme response to extreme pain. It was, as they put it, “a strange and tragic form of self-surgery, not suicide.”^[136]Thomas Danisi, “The ‘Ague’ Made Him Do It,” in We Proceeded On 28, no. 1 (February 2002): pp. 10-15. In other words, Lewis killed himself but did not commit suicide.

This is an extraordinarily ingenious argument. It effectively solves the problem of Lewis’s violent death. Now the overwhelming evidence for what the poet John Donne called “self slaughter” can be accepted, but the stigma of suicide is removed. Good historians that they are, Danisi and Jackson found it impossible to explain away the documentary evidence for suicide. They did not engage in John Guice’s quixotic attempt to undermine the foundation for suicide plank by plank, with good argument and bad. In my opinion, no competent historian, not even the formidable Guice, has been able to dispose of the evidence for suicide in a convincing way. Danisi and Jackson acknowledge the validity of the documents and oral traditions available to us. At the same time they do not believe Lewis was, in psychological terms, a suicidal man. Danisi and Jackson write, “It was the failure of his body, not his mind, nor his dedication, that cut him down. Lewis was simply unable to continue treating a lifelong, incurable illness. His death cannot be attributed, as many have tried to do, to personal weakness or to the failure to rise to a challenge. It was the result of unforgiving nature, the work of an impartial centuries-old protozoa as indifferent and final as a bullet.”^[137]Danisi and Jackson, Meriwether Lewis, p.342.

The often-repeated analogy to the self-slaughter but not suicide theory is the fate of the 200-plus workers in the World Trade Center towers who jumped out of the skyscrapers’ windows after the 11 September 2001, attacks. Those individuals unquestionably jumped to their deaths that morning, but they cannot justly be regarded as people who committed suicide. They were not suicidal. Like Lewis, they killed themselves, but they did not commit suicide.

Given the slender basis for concluding that Meriwether Lewis was murdered, what fuels the persistence and vehemence of the murderists? I think literary historian Albert Furtwangler gets it exactly right. In his remarkable book Acts of Discovery: Visions of America in the Lewis and Clark Journals, Furtwangler writes, “No matter how one takes these lines [from Neelly’s letter to Jefferson], as artless report or contrived cover story, they make a demeaning end for a man like Lewis. . . . One wants his death to be a fitting conclusion to his life, but it reads as a travesty of Lewis’s days on the trail―an incongruous, discontinuous perversion of his career at his height.”^[138]Furtwangler, Acts of Discovery, pp. 224-225. Furtwangler notes that in the last journey of his life, Lewis was not leading, but led, chaperoned by a man as far beneath him as James Neelly. The man who bestrode the source of the Missouri River ended his life in a roadside inn so squalid that he preferred to sleep on the floor. During Lewis’s terrible derangement, one of the expedition’s supreme riflemen “bungles even as a marksman.”^[139]Furtwangler, Acts of Discovery. pp. 224-225.

This seems like an essential insight into the perseverance and the vehemence of the suicide-murder debate. Elliott Coues admitted that one must prefer murder “to clear so great a name from so grave an imputation.”^[140]Coues, The History of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, p. lvi. David Lavender explained that the murder theory “keeps insistently cropping up to explain, in more palatable form, the death of a national hero.”^[141]Lavender, The Way to the Western Sea p.385.

I have in this chapter tried in every possible way to be careful, rational, analytical, and generous. I have described the events of 10–11 October 1809, as objectively and fairly as possible. I end by paraphrasing Richard Dillon.

Was Meriwether Lewis murdered? Let the reader decide. Did Meriwether Lewis commit suicide? Let the facts be submitted to a candid world. As the master himself put it in the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom:

[T]ruth is great, and will prevail if left to herself; that she is the proper and sufficient antagonist to error, and has nothing to fear from the conflict, unless by human interposition disarmed of her natural weapons, free argument and debate; errors ceasing to be dangerous when it is permitted freely to contradict them.^[142]Jefferson, A Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom, Peterson, Thomas Jefferson: Writings, p. 347.

Q. What does the S. stand for?

Straus. My mother’s maiden name. It’s the part of my name that I am most proud of. My grandparents Dick and Rhoda Straus were dairy farmers in Minnesota. They milked sixteen head, mostly Holsteins. They were quiet productive family farmers in Fergus Falls, Minnesota, who never called attention to themselves, paid their bills, never borrowed money, produced organic food, abided by all laws, and gave more to others than to themselves. I have portraits of them, photographs I took in the 1970s, on the wall of the entrance of my home in Bismarck.

Q: What is the basic premise of this book?

I try to do two things. First, I try to differentiate Meriwether Lewis from William Clark. I do not see them as the twins of the highway signs, or the Tweedledee and Tweedledum of the expedition. In my view, Stephen Ambrose was wrong when he said they shared “the best friendship in American history.” Their friendship was a very rich and satisfying one, but it was not without the inevitable tensions of co-leading a 28-month camping trip. You try it! I believe Lewis and Clark were very different men who brought very different skills to the expedition and responded to its challenges and satisfactions in very different ways. And in particular, they led very different lives after they returned from the wilderness in September 1806. So that is the main thing. Second, I believe that Lewis’s post-expedition spiral into chaos and early death was related to both his basic character (fractured) and his experiences in the American wilderness. I try to read the journals of the expedition with fresh eyes in search of what they reveal about Lewis. I try not to read his breakdown and demise back into the journals (though that is a serious temptation), but to let the journals and letters tell us who he was and what went wrong.

I suppose I am trying like everyone else to determine what went so terribly wrong for Lewis. I am not interested in his apparent suicide per se, though it naturally takes up a fair amount of my book. I am interested in what transpired in the course of his life that lured him into the heart of the American heart of darkness and then challenged his basic sense of identity once he was there, and made it impossible for him to re-enter American life in anything like a normal and productive way. I am not particularly interested in the moment he apparently put a gun to his head in 1809, but the train of events that led him to put that gun to his head, beginning with his childhood, but concentrating on the expedition itself.

My goal is to tease out a newer, fuller, more nuanced, less tidy, more problematic Meriwether Lewis, using the journal documents as the basis of my analysis.

My goal is to appreciate Lewis, to celebrate him, to champion him, to explore him, to deconstruct him, to tease out something of the mystery at the core of his life and work, if possible.

My basic premise is that the best decision Lewis ever made was to invite Clark to be his co-captain, that when Clark was nearby but not too close Lewis was outstanding, productive, eloquent, and masterful, but that when the captains (and friends) were separated for more than a few miles or more than a few hours things started to go wrong for Lewis. I spend a large amount of time examining their time apart, both because it puts Lewis in relief, and because I believe it validates my thesis that Lewis was not best suited to be alone for very long, and that all the things that went wrong in Lewis’s life occurred when Clark was somewhere else.

Q: Who or what has influenced your writing?

The main influences on me in the Lewis and Clark world have been James Ronda, whose Lewis and Clark Among the Indians remains the seminal LC book of our time, and David Nicandri, who is the pioneer of the next generation of Lewis and Clark books. His River of Promise: Lewis and Clark on the Columbia was published in 2010.

The Oregon writer Barry Lopez gave me the greatest insight I have ever heard about Meriwether Lewis, and it became one of the foundations of my book.

More generally, my life as a writer (if I can really claim that descriptor) was set by two individuals: Mike Jacobs, now the editor-publisher of the Grand Forks Herald, and Professor Thomas Clayton of the University of Minnesota. Jacobs is a better writer than I am. Clayton was the kind of professor you dream of having: demanding, brilliant beyond description, precise, witty, and sensuous about the Renaissance.

I regard myself not so much as an historian as a humanities scholar. I am not interested (much) in writing straight history, e.g., a narrative account of the Russo-Japanese War. I want always to wrestle with the larger questions of why humans behave as they do, how they self-defeat and self-destruct, how the complexities of questions bedevil any attempt to reduce them to narrative tidiness, how any sense of why things happen as they happen is radically inadequate, how the story we see depends on the lens we wear, how where we stand depends on where we sit, and how history is never settled, never finished, never definitive. I like to look at the journals as texts rather than as a mine from which a tidy narrative can be “constructed.” All my degrees are in English not history. I love Keats’ “negative capability,” and I distrust any sense that humans can really know anything that matters. That humanities emphasis comes from another mentor, the late great Everett Albers, the executive director of the North Dakota Humanities Council. He never wrote anything himself, but he taught me what I know about the waywardness of the human endeavor, individual, corporate, and civilizational.

Q: Who is this book for?

It’s a book for anyone who is interested in Lewis and Clark, in the exploration and peopling of the American West, in the fractured lives of people of great capacity or genius, in white-Indian relations. It is not a biography of Meriwether Lewis. If you want that, Undaunted Courage or Richard Dillon’s Meriwether Lewis are your best bet. Nor is it a full narrative account of the expedition. I don’t tell the story from the moment the expedition left St. Charles on 14 May 1804, until it returned on 23 September 1806. It helps if you know something about the expedition before you read my book, but it’s not really required. In fact, all you need to know can be found on Wikipedia, but who wouldn’t want to read Stephen Ambrose’s Undaunted Courage?

The Character of Meriwether Lewis is not an academic book. It’s not a specialists’ book. It’s a book written for people who love this episode in American history and who are puzzled about the life, character, achievement, and violent death of Meriwether Lewis.

Q: How sure are you that Meriwether Lewis committed suicide?

If you presented the facts as carefully and objectively as possible to an audience of 1000 rational people from Jupiter, 995, at the very least, would conclude that he committed suicide on October 11, 1809. The evidence for suicide is overwhelming, and there is no evidence of any sort that he was murdered. It is, of course, possible that Lewis was murdered. There were no known eyewitnesses, and there are enough puzzles and inconsistencies in the testimony we have to require us to keep open minds. The best that can be said is that, in spite of the utter dearth of evidence, murder cannot be ruled out. That is the position staked out by my friend John Guice, the “dean” of the murder theorists.

I devote two chapters to Lewis’s suicide. In the first one, I try to lay out the details of the last month of his life as carefully and objectively as possible, withholding as long as possible any judgment about the two bullets that entered his body in the early morning hours of October 11. My goal is that everyone will agree that this chapter sets out the facts fairly and comprehensively, and that this chapter is equally useful to the suicidists (as I call them) and the murderists. We’ll see about that.

The second chapter on Lewis’s suicide is simply called “Why?” It’s the longest chapter in the book. My view is that even if it could be proved that Lewis was murdered, there was still some fundamental fracture in his soul and that he was mentally disturbed at the time of his death. My chapter attempts to probe that, by looking at each of the diagnoses that Lewis scholars and others have put forward—Aspergers, manic depression, homosexuality, asexuality, alcoholism, malarial toxicity, bipolar disorder, post traumatic stress syndrome, affair of honor, the Buzz Aldrin syndrome, etc.

I’d like to think my final chapter, “Why?,” gets as close to understanding Lewis as we are going to get without the discovery of new evidence.

Readers will, of course, decide.

Q: Your book automatically gives short shrift to Clark. Why?

Well, it’s a book about Meriwether Lewis. Clark comes up on nearly every page and I think my repeated attempts to differentiate the basic characters of the two captains constitute one of the best things about this book. So I guess I reject your thesis. You cannot put Lewis into full relief until you compare him to Clark, particularly in the years following the expedition, when their once seemingly parallel lives begin to diverge dramatically.

I admire Clark, like him, respect him, and think he was absolutely essential to the success of the expedition.

But I find Clark dramatically less interesting than Lewis. There is no particular mystery about Clark. The only thing that a Clark scholar has to try to wrestle to the ground is how a man of such extraordinary decency, fairness, and humanity, could be so conventionally disappointing in his relation to his slaves, particularly York. It is also worth trying to sort out how a man who really seems to have liked Indians could do so much to dispossess them, but this actually seems more perplexing than it is. With Clark you essentially see what you get and get what you see. With Lewis that is seldom the case.

I’m a Lewis guy. The world is filled with Clark people, believe me. It’s a little annoying to see so many people prefer Clark because he is normal and to shrink back from Lewis, because he is strange and unconventional. At any rate, Clark is very well represented by William Foley and Landon Jones, and I have not felt there is much I could add to their profiles, if anything.

My closest friends who have read this book wound up liking Clark even more after reading my words. So I may inadvertently have worsened the current Clark-up, Lewis-down problem. One of my best friends said she liked my book very much but not Lewis very much at all.

Q: What is your favorite part of the book?

That depends on what kind of mood I am in. I think the most important part of the book is the chapter on Lewis and Silence. I think my analysis of Lewis’s propensity to go silent at inopportune times actually opens new territory and brings important insights to the problem of Lewis. If I were forced to contribute just one chapter to Lewis and Clark studies and no other, that would be the one.

But my favorite part of the book is the last 25 pages. It is there that I try to unlock the mystery of Lewis with all of my might. It’s when I feel closest to Lewis and closest to the heart of the experience he sought in the wilderness. The problem is that by then nobody will still be reading!!! Never write a long book. The ancient poet Callimachus said, mega biblion mega kakon. A big book is a big bother.

Q: How did you write this book?

In sickness and in health, on good days and on bad. What I set out to do is not what I wound up doing. My plan was simply to revise a monograph I wrote about the character of Meriwether Lewis ten years ago. That was all that was required.

I’m 56 years old now. I have come to realize that I don’t have unlimited time left in my career. When I started in on the revision, I decided to start all over and not use more than a handful of sentences from the old book. This was a costly decision in some ways, and yet it was one of the best intellectual decisions I have ever made. At some point in your life, particularly when you start to come to terms with your mortality, you have to commit yourself to your main piece of work, the work for which you wish to be remembered (if you are remembered at all). I knew that I was not yet satisfied that I understood Meriwether Lewis, but that I had a lot to say about him that I had never committed to paper. So I decided to back up and start over and go to the mat and try to say what I had to say about Lewis and not settle for a treatment or an extended essay, but to try to do the best scholarly work of my life.

I started by writing a chapter about Lewis, Clark, the mosquito, and the confluence of the Missouri and Yellowstone Rivers. I think the story I get to tell in that chapter is hilarious, ironic, absurd; that it shows how much can pivot on things we never tend to think about. From there I moved to what became the introductory chapter in which I try to prove that Lewis regarded himself as the sole commander and the sole explorer of the expedition, and that when the great discovery moments of the expedition came, he invariably found a way to strike out ahead of the rest, particularly Clark, so that he could be the “first civilized man.” I discovered this pattern a number of years ago and, so far as I know, nobody has ever really concentrated on this dynamic before. If I am right about this, it puts the friendship in an entirely new light and explains some passages that would otherwise be hard to make sense of.

Then I wrote the chapter on silence, and after that the Last Journey chapter and the “Why?” chapter.

Finally, I wrote about birthdays, holidays, and anniversaries, partly to relieve the tension and just write something fun, but also to find another way to illuminate the differences between Lewis and Clark.

It took about a year to write the book. For about half that time I wrote eight to ten hours a day. Then as 2011 began, I got serious. By April I was sitting in the same desk 14-17 hours a day. There is something really amazing when that moment comes. The book has taken over your life. You eat only to banish hunger, sleep only to be able to keep going, and you start to live in your book. There are days when you never shower, never make a phone call, never get up from the table. You get that oleaginous sheen that you get when you fly for 15 straight hours. You actually dream about the book or things in the book and you wake up at 2:30 a.m. with a thought about a sentence you wrote or should write. The book is the first thing you think about when you wake up in the morning and the last thing you think about as you drift off to sleep.

Q: What kind of man was Lewis?

High strung. Self-pushing and self-punishing. So tightly bound to the success of his “darling project” that he let it destabilize him. He was disciplined—and yet he did not keep a regular journal. He was a magnificent writer—when the switch was on. He had the impulse to put himself out beyond his comfort level, to get to the far edge of the civilizational enterprise, to test himself against Nature, the Other, Himself, the Wilderness, Enchantment, and (to his eternal credit) he refused to shrug off what he discovered. There is a kind of genius in Lewis, but it is a fractured and troubled and ultimately self-destructive genius. He was marginal in some essential way. I’m not quite sure why or how, but he never married, even though he tried and he was a national hero at some level. It’s a mystery.

Q: What is your goal in this book?

It’s simple, but inordinately ambitious and I suppose pretentious. I would like this book to become prolegomena to all future Lewis and Clark (or at least Lewis) studies. Period. Not likely, of course, but we don’t get what we don’t aim for. I’d like everyone, even those who disagree with this book, to say, “You have to read this book. You won’t agree with all that this guy says, but even when you disagree you will understand Lewis and Clark better for having read this book.”

Unlikely, but a lovely illusion, and what is life without illusion? Without illusion, no one would ever write a book.

I would hope that this book puts to rest some of the murder-suicide debate. There will always be some who maintain that Lewis was murdered, merely because they want the story to come out that way, but I think 500 years from now there will be virtually no murderists. My goal is to present the case as thoughtfully and fairly as possible, playfully, and to increase the number of people who can accept that he committed suicide.

I’d like to get on the Jon Stewart Show.

Q: You are known for your work on Jefferson. Where is he in all of this?

There is probably too much Jefferson in this book. But here’s how I see it. The journey was Jefferson’s brainchild. Lewis was Jefferson’s protégé, secretary, aide de camp and (in some respects) surrogate son. Lewis carried a great deal of Jeffersonian baggage with him into the wilderness and he was trying to apply Jefferson’s worldview and western development template throughout the journey. Jefferson purchased Louisiana. Jefferson wrote the famous instructions to Lewis. It was for Jefferson (primarily) that Lewis was writing the book. And that is primarily why Lewis could not write the book.

More particularly, I think Lewis and Clark studies have suffered from self-referentiality. Along with my friend David Nicandri I believe that we cannot really understand Lewis and Clark unless we understand the early national period of the United States, the travels of Zebulon Pike, James Cook, Alexander von Humboldt, Alexander Mackenzie, and others; and that the self-satisfied decontextualized world of Lewis and Clark suffers from a kind provincialism. The more we connect Lewis and Clark to the larger and larger concentricities of what might be called the Europeanization of North America, the better off we are. Jefferson connects many strands of the Lewis and Clark story, and connects that story to the larger meaning of the American Revolution.

Besides, I love Jefferson and a writer gets to include that which pleases him or her, so long as it is not merely adventitious.

Q: How long did it take you to write this book?

I started in on it in August 2010, and finished it on May 15, 2011, the day before my mother and daughter and I sailed for England on the Queen Mary II.

But I have been thinking about Lewis for more than thirty years, sometimes intensely. I have traveled the entire Lewis & Clark Trail, by car, in boats, in canoes and kayaks, on foot, in light aircraft, etc. This is not like taking on something entirely new (Disraeli or the War of 1812) and then working up some knowledge about it. I have lived Thomas Jefferson and Lewis and Clark for most of my adult life.

Q: Is there anything you wish you could revise?

Of course. A book never really ends, you just finally agree to put a gun to its head and kill it off. In the past two months I have read through the manuscript carefully three or four times for different editorial purposes. I found a few passages I would like to rewrite or clarify. That’s inevitable, I suppose. There is one omission in the birthdays, anniversaries, and holidays chapter that is not particularly important, but I didn’t discover it until too late. If there is a second edition I will add a couple of paragraphs on that score. Meanwhile, I hope nobody notices.

As this book went to press, there was a rumor out of Montana that a local landowner near Upper Portage Camp may have “discovered” what’s left of the iron-framed boat, the Experiment. I have a close friend who urged me to wait until it is (or is not) authenticated. I’m frankly very skeptical about the discovery. But we’ll see. I had written about the whereabouts of the iron frame in the book, and my argument was that Lewis surely dug it up on the return journey because the expedition was bankrupt and the iron was like an American Express Platinum card as they neared the Mandan and Hidatsa, those wealthy but metal-starved earthlodge peoples in central North Dakota. By this time next year I may be shown to have been wrong about the boat. Even so, I think my argument that the most likely scenario (since the journals are silent) is that Lewis retrieved the boat and that it was either given to the Mandan and Hidatsa, sold to them in trade for necessities and artifacts for Jefferson, or given to Charbonneau along with the expedition’s blacksmith kit on or about August 17, 1806. If I prove to be wrong, readers will understand that my analysis occurred before the “find” was authenticated.

Q: How do you write?

It’s not very glamorous. I write on my laptop computer. Never with a pen. I print drafts as I go along and then read them on airplanes, in bars and restaurants, in coffee shops, etc., and write corrections and queries in the margins. I waste a lot of paper in printing drafts, almost day by day. I write fast, at least when I know what I am talking about. In the course of a day of writing, I’ll look into twenty or thirty books for information or quotations and by the end of the day my work space will be strewn with books, some half open, some with pens in as placeholders, some dog-eared. It’s a mess.

The best advice I ever got about writing was from a friend of mine named Warren Lerude. “Always park on a hill.” In other words, at the end of the day, start a paragraph or even a sentence and just quit right in the middle. Then, when you return the following day, you have that sentence to complete. This is relatively easy to do, and it creates momentum. The worst thing about writing is the blank sheet of paper (or blank screen) before you. Parking on a hill solves that problem. I know this sounds sort of silly, but it works.

The other thing I do is not get up every time there is some piece of information I need. If you do that, all you will do is get up and wander through your library. So when I come to something I don’t know (the date of a boat accident, the name of that Shoshone woman, the year Jefferson did something) I just write X. “The accident occurred on May X [maybe it was June], 1805 [check] and after that the captains decided never to be on shore at the same time [make sure of the quotation here].” That sort of thing. Then, about once every two hours, I get up and start filling in the Xs. It is a form of writing discipline, and it makes sure you keep moving forward. Getting up is tempting, but you often lose the train of the argument while you search for something that is really not important to the thesis you are pursuing.

I don’t like to write much, though at some point in every day and a number of times per month I get into the zone and then (and only then) I think, “I’m actually a WRITER.” But I love to have written. I love to print out the 3000 words I wrote on a Tuesday and then go somewhere to sip a beer or two while reading over what I wrote and planning additions, corrections, elaborations, etc.

Q: Some people say that everything has already been said about Lewis & Clark.

I disagree entirely. With the successful completion of Gary Moulton’s authoritative edition of the journals of Lewis and Clark, we all need to read every journal entry by every journal keeper, and all the ancillary documents, with the freshest eyes we can possibly bring to the project. It would be best if we could all be zapped by that device Will Smith carries around in the Men in Black movies. Then we could look at Lewis and Clark with fresh eyes, innocent eyes. One of my deepest yearnings is to read Hamlet again but as if for the first time.

Each generation has to reinterpret everything. The idea that everything could be said about the French Revolution or the life of Julius Caesar is patently ludicrous. Even if we never discover a single new Lewis and Clark document, we will need new books and articles for each new generation of Americans.

My book says a great deal about Lewis and Clark that has never been said before. It may be baloney and idiocy, but it is new. I did not try to write anything outrageous or new or unique, by the way. I am not one of those authors who say crazy things not because they believe them but because they want to get attention or say something new and original, no matter what the cost. I wrote precisely what I think about Meriwether Lewis, and so far as I know there is nothing I argue in the book that I do not actually believe to be the truth. I’m sure there are some things I overstate, but I do so not to get attention but rather because I am caught up in the argument I am making. When I read over the manuscript a month ago I found a few things that seemed possibly to be overstated. For example, I argue that even as late as Fort Clatsop it is not clear that Lewis could have named every man (and woman) who was participating in the expedition. I do think that might be true. But when I read the manuscript for the last time before it went to print, I thought, well, maybe that’s a whopper. I nearly qualified the statement or withdrew it, but then I stepped back to think about it and decided I really thought it true. So I kept it.

I wonder how many Lewis and Clark scholars have read all thirteen volumes of the University of Nebraska edition of Lewis and Clark. I know I haven’t. I think we should all stop, take a deep breath, and read the journals through, and then read Donald Jackson’s Letters of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, and then James Holmberg’s collection of the Clark letters. And Pike, Mackenzie, Freeman [see Freeman-Custis Expedition] and Dunbar [see Hunter and Dunbar Expedition], Cook, Humboldt, Park, etc. And then and only then start writing about Lewis and Clark.

Q: What role do Indians play in your book?

Not much in this book. Lewis didn’t like Indians very much, I think. He found them annoying. I write extensively about his relations with Indians at Fort Mandan in the chapter called “Meriwether Lewis’s Bad Day,” and again in the chapter on his crucial meeting with the Shoshone in August 1805. I write a good deal about the captains and Sacagawea. I’m extremely interested in white-Indian relations and the insights that James Ronda opened up in Lewis and Clark studies. But my focus in this book is Lewis, and particularly Lewis’s sense of himself, so there is not much room to wander into that area of fascination.

Q: You are well known for your love of North Dakota.

Indeed. That doesn’t have much to do with this book, but I love North Dakota with all my heart and never plan to leave, though there are things about this place at this time that are hard on the human spirit. I did write three chapters that are primarily about Lewis and Clark in North Dakota, not because the events I analyze happened in North Dakota, but rather because really important things happened in North Dakota that reveal Lewis’s character. They are: “Meriwether Lewis’s Bad Day,” “Damn You: Lewis and Clark at the Confluence,” and “Getting There First.” One of the three original maps in the book is of the region around Fort Mandan. Lewis and Clark spent more time in North Dakota than in any other state, and their relations with the Mandan and Hidatsa Indians were the most successful and ethnographically interesting of all their relations with Indians. Lewis was shot in the buttocks in North Dakota. Even more to the point, on April 7, 1805, as the expedition left Fort Mandan, Lewis believed that he was walking off the map of the known world. I spend a good deal of time writing about that moment and how Lewis saw it.

Q: Have you said what you have to say about Lewis and Clark now?

Not altogether. I have said what I want to say about Lewis. I could say more, of course, and it would be fun to write a short (200 page) biography of Lewis, but that is well into the future, I think.

I want to write a book whose working title is Getting Noticed on the Lewis and Clark Trail. It would explore how things find their way into the journals, and how that represents or distorts the picture of what actually happened on the expedition. That book would also examine what might be called the dynamics of the journals—how they were written, when, under what circumstances, based on what raw materials, and for what intended audience, if any.

I’d like to write a short book called The Burden of Being Clark.

And I’d like to try to write a cultural studies treatment of Sacagawea. There is no single adequate book on Sacagawea, and a great deal of mythology and even nonsense circulates about her. I’d like to pare it down to what we know first, and then to move out from that core.

I’m also very much interested in a long analysis of the ways in which Nicholas Biddle‘s paraphrase narrative of the expedition (1814) was crafted and how it has influenced the discourse.

But if I never write another sentence about Lewis and Clark, I will be content with the book that I have now finally finished.

What is next for you?

I’m writing two books about North Dakota. One is about the future of North Dakota, as a kind of inventory and projection of North Dakota as it stumbles its way into the twenty-first century. The other is a novel about white-Indian relations. I should finish at least one of those books early in 2012.

I’m also wanting to return to a big book on Thomas Jefferson that I have been working on on and off for many years. It’s called The Paradox of Thomas Jefferson. The good news is that this book has given me a new confidence, and I hope to spend that capital in finishing what I hope will be a very big book on Jefferson, who is my primary hero in this sublunary world, as Mr. Lewis puts it.

I’m working on a couple of documentary films, one on the late North Dakotan Eric Sevareid. I want to do a series of daylong video interviews with 100 North Dakotans called The Dakota Interviews.
And I’d like to write a book on Theodore Roosevelt’s intellectual life. I’m well underway with a new edition of Hermann Hagedorn’s book Roosevelt in the Bad Lands.

And much more.

Q: How many books have you written?

This is, I think, my eighth or ninth book. But that is not really a useful statistic. This is without question the most ambitious book I have written, the most serious, the longest, and the one that I poured my soul into as never before into anything. If I could only be judged for one intellectual construct, this would be it, without question. This is, I believe, a major book. Even if everyone else disagrees, in this book I got to say what I wanted to say about a very important subject, and I did not have to hold back or conform to someone else’s idea of what it should be or what it should say. In other words, I got to write precisely the book I wanted to write about Meriwether Lewis, and if the world rejects my views, it will not be because I did not articulate them in their fullness.

My main books are:

The Character of Meriwether Lewis: Explorer in the Wilderness.

A Free and Hardy Life: Theodore Roosevelt’s Sojourn in the American West.

Becoming Jefferson’s People: Re-Inventing the American Republic in the Twenty-First Century.

A Vast and Open Plain: The Writings of the Lewis and Clark Expedition in North Dakota.

And

Message on the Wind: A Spiritual Odyssey on the Northern Plains.

What is it like to write a book?

Agony and ecstasy. I have a different feeling about this book than about my previous books. First, it is a much more ambitious and serious book than the others, not that they weren’t those things too. Second, since I moved home to North Dakota six years ago, I have actually become a writer, as opposed to someone who does a number of things, among which is writing. I honestly consider myself a writer now. When people on airplanes ask me what I do, I used to say, “Oh, I’m a humanities scholar, I do this and that and X and Y and Z.” Now, I gulp a little and say, “I’m a writer.” And I do so without any internal blushing.

Writing a book is very hard work. I don’t know why anyone does it, frankly. It’s unbelievably lonely. It consumes you. It distances you from your friends, your family, from community, from life. People don’t read much any more, and your best friends cannot be counted on to buy your book, your baby, your brainchild, much less read it. Then there are the critics who are disposed, often pre-disposed, to dislike what you have done or to wonder why you didn’t write the book they would have written, which—by the way—they didn’t!

I cannot wait to hold my book in my hands, to feel the heft of it, to turn it over and just look at all those words displayed in such orderliness. (If they only knew!). I cannot wait to do book signings, to meet people who have curiosity about Lewis and Clark, to be able to say with pride, “this is a book I am very proud of.”

There are many things that humans do that are actually very hard to do: Run marathons. Climb tall mountains. Play the clarinet. Design a house. Cook world class meals. Make beautiful pottery. Writing a book is one of those things. In my own hierarchy it is one of the very best things, the very most impressive things, that humans can achieve. My heroes are Erasmus, Jefferson, John Donne, Thoreau, Dr. Johnson, John Milton, Charles Dickens, Roosevelt: writers. Sometimes I find myself in the shower or in the taxi or in the hotel bar thinking, “Hey, I wrote a book.” I wrote a book, and it is not a throwaway book, and there was no ghostwriter (Mr. Limbaugh, Mr. Stewart, Mrs. Clinton). Nobody helped me. I just sat down and did it. I never thought I would be the kind of man who would write a big book. My freshman English teacher Agnes Oxton gave me Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac as my high school graduation gift. She wrote in it, “Maybe some day you will write a book.” That paperback, which probably cost her $4.50, is one of my greatest treasures. I have written a number of books now but this truly feels like the book she reckoned I was perhaps going to find a way to write.

It’s exhilarating in the highest degree.

Roosevelt said it is not the critic who counts but the man who is actually in the arena. I know lots of grumbling folks who judge and despise everything around them, who find fault, who look down on the world with a sense of their superiority, but the funny thing is that most of them have never done jack, if I may use so exalted a term. Here’s the paradox. There are hundreds of thousands, no doubt millions, of people who have talents and accomplishments that dwarf mine in any number of ways. I see myself as a minor figure in the world of history and belles lettres. But the people who have lorded it over me in the course of my life are all people who could not write a book, and meanwhile the people who are clearly superior to me (and they are legion) have all been unendingly generous. Hmmmm.

Whatever else is true for the rest of my life, I will always be able to say, “I wrote an important book on Meriwether Lewis.” I may have to add, “It is true that it sank without a trace,” or “I admit that it came stillborn into the world,” or “It was savaged by critics as few books have ever been savaged,” or “It was an act of almost immeasurable futility,” but I will still know that I sat down and wrote a long, loving, thoughtful, earnest book about something I regard as inherently important.

It is, I repeat, more fun to have written a book than to write one.