Lewis set about straightening out his affairs. On September 22, he wrote his old friend Major Amos Stoddard, in command at Fort Adams, farther down the river. He began with an apology: “I must acknowledge myself remiss in not writing you in answer to several friendly epistles which I have received from you since my return from the Pacific Ocean.” He said he was on his way to Washington to explain his actions in St. Louis, which he hoped “is all that is necessary . . . to put all matters right.” But his creditors were pressing him and had “excessively embarrassed me. I hope you will therefore pardon me for asking you to remit as soon as is convenient the sum of $200 which you have informed me you hold for me. . . .
“You will direct to me at the City of Washington untill the last of December after which I expect I shall be on my return to St. Louis.”8
Lewis asked Russell to accompany him to Washington, and Russell agreed: he too had some protested bills to explain to the new administration. But he could not get the leave of absence he had requested.9
Major James Neelly, the U.S. agent to the Chickasaw nation, had arrived at Fort Pickering on September 18. He later wrote Jefferson that he “found the governor in Very bad health” but that during the week Lewis “recovered his health in some digree.”10
By September 29, Russell and Neelly were satisfied that Lewis was capable of traveling overland to Washington, if accompanied by Neelly, Pernier, and Neelly’s servant. Lewis said he was ready to make the journey. Russell lent him $100 and sold him two horses on credit for the journey; Lewis signed a promissory note for $379.58 payable before January 1, 1810, for the loan and the horses.11
Lewis had with him the journals, packed in trunks and carried by packhorse. The Natchez Trace seemed much safer to him than risking a sailboat from New Orleans to Washington, with British warships prowling the Atlantic Coast, stopping American vessels, and impressing American seamen into British service. What the British would give to have those journals! There was no danger of that on the Trace, which was the most heavily traveled road of the Old Southwest. The mail passed over it regularly. No robbery had been reported for years. There were inns along the way.12
It took the party three days to cover a hundred miles. Along the way, Lewis repeatedly complained about his protested drafts. Pernier later reported to Clark that Lewis would frequently “Conceipt [conceive] that he herd me [Clark] coming on, and Said that he was certain [I would] over take him. that I had herd of his Situation and would Come to his releaf.”13
Lewis was drinking again, or, as Russell so heartbreakingly put it, “His resolution [never to drink again] left him.”14 Neelly later reported to Jefferson that, when they arrived at the Chickasaw Agency, some six miles north of present Houston, Mississippi, Lewis “appeared at times deranged in mind.”
At Neelly’s insistence, the party stayed two days at the agency to rest. Lewis asked Neelly, in the event that “any accident happened to him,” to send his trunks with the journals to “the President,” by whom Neelly assumed Lewis meant Jefferson, not Madison.
On October 6, Lewis, Neelly, and the servants set out again. On the morning of October 9, they crossed the Tennessee River and camped near the present village of Collinwood, Tennessee.
That night, two of the horses strayed. In the morning, Neelly said he would stay behind to find them. Lewis decided to proceed, Neelly reported, “with a promise to wait for me at the first house he Came to that was inhabited by white people.”15
Late in the afternoon, Lewis arrived at Grinder’s Inn, seventy-two miles short of Nashville. It was a rough-hewn, poorly built log cabin that took in overnight customers. Mr. Grinder was away.
Lewis requested accommodations for the night. Are you alone? Mrs. Grinder asked. No, Lewis replied, two servants would be coming on shortly. Mrs. Grinder said they were welcome. Lewis dismounted, unsaddled his horse, and brought the saddle in the house. He was dressed “in a loose gown, white, striped with blue.” He asked for some whiskey, of which he drank but a little.
When Pernier and the other servant arrived, Lewis asked for his gunpowder, saying he was sure he had some in a canister. Pernier “gave no distinct reply,” probably because he had been told by Neelly to keep the powder away from Lewis.
Lewis began pacing in front of the cabin. Mrs. Grinder later reported that “sometimes he would seem as if he were walking up to her; and would suddenly wheel round, and walk back as fast as he could.”
She prepared a meal. Lewis entered the cabin and sat at the table, but after only a few mouthfuls he started up, “speaking to himself in a violent manner.” Mrs. Grinder noted that his face was flushed, “as if it had come on him in a fit.”
Lewis lit his pipe, drew a chair to the door, sat down, and remarked to Mrs. Grinder, in a kindly tone, “Madam this is a very pleasant evening.”
After finishing the pipe, he rose and paced the yard. He sat again, lit another pipe, seemed composed. He cast his eyes “wishfully towards the west.” He spoke again of what “a sweet evening” it was.
•
As he sat on Mrs. Grinder’s porch, looking west while the light faded from the sky, what were his thoughts? Were they of the rivers, the Missouri and the Columbia and the others? Did he recall the Arikaras, the Sioux, the Mandans? Did he think of the first time he had seen Sacagawea? Did he remember the April day in 1805 when he started out from the Mandan nation on his “darling project,” daring to link his name with Columbus and Captain Cook? Did he dwell on the decision at the Marias?
Or were the plants, animals, birds, scenery of the Garden of Eden he had passed through commanding his imagination? If so, surely he thought of cottonwoods, prickly pears, the gigantic trees of the Pacific Coast; of grouse and woodpeckers and condors; of the grizzlies and the unbelievable buffalo herds, the pronghorns, sheep, coyotes, prairie dogs, and the other animals he had discovered and described; of those remarkable white cliffs along the Missouri, the Gates of the Rocky Mountains, the Columbia gorge.
Did Three Forks, that “essential spot” in the geography of the West, spring to his mind? Or was it Cameahwait and the Shoshones? Perhaps it was Old Toby, and that terrible trip across the Bitterroots.
Did he recall the Nez Percé and their fabulous ponies and generosity? Or the journey down the western waters to the sea? Or was it his Christmas and New Year’s dinners of water and lean elk at Fort Clatsop?
It may be that he thought of the long waiting period with the Nez Percé, and the one time he had been forced to turn back in the first attempt to force the Bitterroots, in the spring of 1806. Or was it the Blackfeet and the only Indian fight of his life? Or the time he got shot in the ass?
Did he do a roll call of his men? If so, surely there was a special place for Drouillard.
If he thought of the men, surely he thought of his co-commander, the best friend any man ever had. He had told Pernier earlier that day that General Clark had heard of his difficulties and was coming on. As the light faded, was he looking westward along the Trace, expecting to see Clark ride in to set everything right?
Did one of Mrs. Grinder’s dogs chase a squirrel and remind him of Seaman?
Could it be that he thought of that moment of triumph when his canoes put in at St. Louis in September 1806?
•
Or were his thoughts gloomy? Were they about his unsolvable problems? Did he agonize over his speculations and the financial ruin they had brought him? Was that awful Secretary Bates foremost in his thoughts? Did he wonder why he had failed in his courtships and had no wife? Did he curse himself for his drinking?
Did his mind dwell on Thomas Jefferson? Was he ashamed of how he had failed the man he adored? Did he think of the journals, over in the corner in his saddlebags?
Or did his mind avoid the past? Was he rehearsing what he would say to Secretary Eustis and President Madison?
Or was he yearning for more pills? Or more whiskey?
We cannot know. We only know that he was tortured, that his pain was unbearable.
r /> •
Mrs. Grinder began to prepare a bed for him, but he stopped her and said he would sleep on the floor, explaining that since his journey to the Pacific he could no longer sleep on a feather bed. He had Pernier bring in his bear skins and buffalo robe and spread them on the floor. While Pernier was getting the bedding, Lewis found some powder.
Mrs. Grinder went to the kitchen to sleep, and the servants went to the barn, some two hundred yards distant.
Lewis began pacing in his room. This went on for several hours. Mrs. Grinder, who was frightened and could not sleep, heard him talking aloud, “like a lawyer.”
Lewis got out his pistols. He loaded them and at some time during the early hours of October 11 shot himself in the head. The ball only grazed his skull.
He fell heavily to the floor. Mrs. Grinder heard him exclaim, “O Lord!”
Lewis rose, took up his other pistol, and shot himself in his breast. The ball entered and passed downward through his body, to emerge low down on his backbone.
He survived the second shot, staggered to the door of his room, and called out, “O madam! Give me some water, and heal my wounds.”
Lewis staggered outside, fell, crawled for some distance, raised himself by the side of a tree, then staggered back to his room. He scraped the bucket with a gourd for water, but the bucket was empty. He collapsed on his robes.
At first light, the terrified Mrs. Grinder sent her children to fetch the servants. When they got to Lewis’s room, they found him “busily engaged in cutting himself from head to foot” with his razor.
Lewis saw Pernier and said to him, “I have done the business my good Servant give me some water.” Pernier did.
Lewis uncovered his side and showed them the second wound. He said, “I am no coward; but I am so strong, [it is] so hard to die.” He said he had tried to kill himself to deprive his enemies of the pleasure and honor of doing it.
He begged the servants to take his rifle and blow out his brains, telling them not to be afraid, for he would not hurt them, and they could have all the money in his trunk.
Shortly after sunrise, his great heart stopped beating.16
* * *
I. Words enclosed in { } were inserted between the lines; italicized words enclosed in { } were crossed out.
CHAPTER FORTY
Aftermath
On October 28, Clark got the news of Lewis’s suicide, from the Frankfort, Kentucky, Argus of Western America. He was in Shelbyville, on his way to Washington. George Shannon was with him. Clark wrote his brother Jonathan:
I fear this report has too much truth. . . . my reason for thinking it possible is found on the letter I received from him at your house. . . .
I fear O’ I fear the weight of his mind has overcome him, what will be the Consequence?1
Two days later, Clark wrote again, to report he had
herd of the Certainty of the death of Govr. Lewis which givs us much uneasiness. . . .
I wish much to get the letter I receved of Govr. Lewis from New Madrid, which you Saw it will be of great Service to me prey send it. . . . I wish I had Some Conversation with you.2
Lewis’s letter to Clark—written around September 11, the day Lewis wrote his will—has never been found.
•
Jefferson got the news at Monticello in November, via either the newspapers or Neelly’s letter to him. Neelly said he had arrived at Grinder’s Inn on the morning of October 11, after Lewis’s death, and had buried him as “decently as I could.”I He gave a brief account of the suicide and asked instructions on what to do with Lewis’s trunks.3 A week or so later, Pernier visited Jefferson and gave him an eyewitness account of Lewis’s last day on earth.
Jefferson’s first known written comment on Lewis’s death is in a letter to Dr. William Dickson, of Nashville, dated April 20, 1810. Dickson had sent on a miniature of Lewis and Lewis’s watch chain, which had somehow come into his possession. In acknowledging their receipt, Jefferson said he was sending the items to Lewis’s mother. “The deplorable accident which has placed her in the deepest affliction,” he wrote, “is a great loss to the world also; as no pen can ever give us so faithful & lively an account of the countries & nations which he saw, as his own would have done, under the guidance of impressions made by the objects themselves.”4
Eight days later, Jefferson wrote Captain Russell, his first known comment on the cause of the suicide. He said Lewis “was much afflicted & habitually so with hypocondria. This was probably increased by the habit into which he had fallen & the painfull reflections that would necessarily produce in a mind like his.”5
Some three years later, in a short biography of Lewis, Jefferson went into more detail:
Governor Lewis had from early life been subject to hypocondriac affections. It was a constitutional disposition in all the nearer branches of the family of his name, & was more immediately inherited by him from his father. . . . While he lived with me in Washington, I observed at times sensible depressions of mind, but knowing their constitutional source, I estimated their course by what I had seen in the family. During his Western expedition the constant exertion which that required of all the faculties of body & mind, suspended these distressing affections; but after his establishment at St. Louis in sedentary occupations they returned upon him with redoubled vigor, and began seriously to alarm his friends. . . .
At about 3 o’clock in the night [of October 10–11] he did the deed which plunged his friends into affliction and deprived his country of one of her most valued citizens.6
There is a considerable literature on the possibility that Lewis did not commit suicide but was murdered. The first to put forth that claim in any detail was Vardis Fisher.7 Dr. Chuinard has more recently made the same assertion.8 The literature is not convincing; the detailed refutation by Paul Russell Cutright is.9
A suggestion has been made that Lewis’s mental problems stemmed not from hypochondria, as Jefferson would have it, or a manic-depressive syndrome, but from the effects of an advanced case of syphilis.10 It is more intriguing and speculative than convincing.
What is convincing is the initial reaction of the two men who knew Lewis best and loved him most. William Clark and Thomas Jefferson immediately concluded that the story of Lewis’s suicide was entirely believable, Clark on the basis of his intimate knowledge of Lewis’s mental state and more explicitly on the never-found Lewis letter of mid-September. Neither Jefferson nor Clark ever doubted that Lewis killed himself.
Those who still hold out for murder need to deal with a “dog that did not bark” aspect of the case. Had William Clark entertained the slightest suspicion that his friend had been murdered, can anyone doubt that he would have gone to Tennessee immediately to find and hang the murderer? Or, if Jefferson had such suspicions, that he would have insisted the government launch an investigation?
•
Lewis’s half-brother, John Marks, did an inventory of Lewis’s debts and assets. He had private debts amounting to $4,196.12 and protested drafts totaling $6,956.62. His credits and estate were worth $5,700. He had a further credit of $754.50 for Indian presents and gunpowder sold by Chouteau after he returned from successfully getting Big White back to the Mandan nation. It turned out that the presents and the gunpowder, which had been the cause of such distress to Lewis when the Madison administration refused to honor the draft used to pay for them, were not needed.11
Clark visited Washington in December 1809. He recorded in the journal he kept that on December 18 he “Went to see the Secretary of War [Eustis], had a long talk abt. Govr. Lewis, [he] pointed out his intentions & views for the protests. Declaired the Govr had not lost the Confidence of the Government.”12 The statement was two months and seven days too late.
•
“I do not know what I Shall do about the publication of the Book,” Clark wrote Jonathan.13
Clark was ignorant of what had been done to get a manuscript ready for the printer. In a memorandum he wrote to himself in lat
e 1809, before going to Philadelphia to see what could be done about publication, he put down questions he needed to ask:
Enquire what has been done by G[overnor] L[ewis] with Calculations—engraving Printing Botany.
If a man can be got to go to St. Louis with me to write the journal & price.
The price of engraving animals Ind[ian]s & Maps Paper & other expences.
Get some one to write the scientific part & natural history—Botany, Mineralogy & Zoology.
Praries—muddiness of the Miissouri.
Natural Phenomena—23 vocabularies & plates & engraving.14
Obviously, Clark had discussed none of this with Lewis, who had already taken care of and paid for some of the arrangements Clark thought he needed to make. Amazingly, Lewis had never talked to Clark about publication, except to promise one more time that when he got to Philadelphia he would complete the task.
•
This is the great mystery of Lewis’s life. There is only speculation on what kept him from preparing the journals for the publisher, but no one can know the cause for certain, any more than anyone can know for certain the cause of his suicide.
On learning of Lewis’s suicide, the publishers, C. and A. Conrad of Philadelphia, told Jefferson that they had a contract to produce the journals and asked what they should do now. “Govr. Lewis never furnished us with a line of the M.S.,” they told Jefferson, “nor indeed could we ever hear any thing from him respecting it tho frequent applications to that effect were made to him.”15
Jefferson replied that the journals were coming to Monticello, and so was Clark; that they would consult; that Clark would come on to Philadelphia to see what could be done.
When Clark arrived at Monticello, there was apparently some talk about Jefferson’s taking over the journals and doing the editing to prepare them for the printer. There was no man alive who had a greater interest in the subject, or one who had better qualifications for the job. But he was sixty-five years old and desired to spend his remaining years at Monticello as a gentleman farmer. In January 1810, Lewis’s cousin William Meriwether wrote Clark, “Mr Jefferson would not undertake the work.”16