“I fear O! I fear the waight of his mind has come over him, what will be the Consequence?”
– William Clark

Although I’ve never seen any persuasive evidence of it, I keep hearing rumors that Meriwether Lewis attended school at Liberty Hall, the forerunner of Washington and Lee University.  I’d like to know the facts of the matter, but I’m more intrigued by the controversy surrounding the unfortunate explorer’s death than his education, which was probably at the hands of a couple of Virginians who were tutors, independent contractors and not employed by institutions.

As we know from the Journals of Lewis, Clark, Ordway and their traveling companions (and more recently, from Ken Burns’ documentary “Lewis & Clark: The Journey of the Corps of Discovery”), Lewis was a brave and resourceful man, a master of logistics who could also shoot, draw, heal (after his mother, an herbalist), negotiate and take risks.  And he was a serious depressive whose post-safari life was neither prosperous nor fulfilling.  But he could write up a storm – narrative, description, speculation.  No wonder Jefferson hired Lewis on as his private secretary; no wonder the President selected his protégé to travel to territories as uncharted and mysterious back then as the moon.  The story of the search for a water route to the Pacific is one of our most astonishing, almost the American Arabian Nights, but when the rivers were mapped, the treaties established, the grizzlies and candlefish and mosquitoes discovered, described, catalogued and shipped home, Lewis had to move among and discourse with the earthmen again, and he was not cut out for that.

He was especially not possessed of the right temperament to be the Governor of Louisiana, and though he’d been a wonder of frugality and accountability on the great expedition, finances or at least financial records down on the bayou went awry.  Amok, really.  Reimbursements and receipts, bids and balances, debts and conflicts of interest – he was out of his element and attracted rivals and enemies like honey draws ants.  He took strong measures of brandy and laudanum.  He began to speak to phantoms and mists.  In the autumn of 1809 he headed east to try to explain himself to his mentor and benefactor, the Wizard of Monticello.

A companion named Neely, some servants and hard roads.  Rain and more rain.  Early in the journey he tried to take his own life.  Maybe twice.  Then on the evening of October 10, traveling the Natchez Trace in Tennessee, he arrived at a dogtrot tavern called Grinder’s Stand, offering bed (or pallet) and meager fare for beleaguered wanderers amid the border ruffians and hard weathers of the frontier.  The owners were Robert Grinder (away on business) and his wife Priscilla (present, and later, suspected, though not officially accused).  There were other guests; reports on their number vary.  He had a purse that disappeared.  He was almost incoherent (as Mrs. Grinder later said, like a man recently returned from the moon).  Anyway, nocturnal events transpired.  In the morning, Captain Lewis was dead, certainly shot, maybe cut, perhaps in his room or just outside, maybe on the bank of the nearby creek.  Though shots had been heard in the night, horsemen passing (not uncommon), no one had mounted a rescue attempt or even a curious inquiry.  Assassination? Quarrel, followed by murder?  Suicide?  Stephen Ambrose and a whole cadre of historians have passed the verdict of self-murder.  It’s the story taught in the schools, and if the election were held today, I’d vote with that party, as did William Clark and Jefferson (who would later write that Lewis suffered from “hypochondriacal affection”) when the grim news reached them.  The more recent Vardis Fisher murder-most-foul contingent has never convinced me.

Still, the common thread amid the conflicting reports is that he was shot at least twice, once in the chest, once in the head.  He may also have been slashed with a razor.

The core of the controversy is a set of documents, which I’ve seen only excerpts from and which relate the multiple and contradictory testimonies of Mrs. Grinder, who could not seem to settle on the number of bullet wounds or the location of the body and who had no persuasive explanation for not investigating the shots in the night.  She was either rattled by the investigation or keeping secrets; we’ll never know.  Why her husband, miles distant on that peculiar night, was actually charged is a matter for forensic historians to dance around for years.  Frontier record keeping has never been an art.  I do not believe for a moment accepted that the premise that the husband came home to catch Priscilla and Meriwether in flagrante.  That was not the Governor’s inclination nor the likely outcome of a frightened and frightening night, which early evening guests described as akin to a mad scene in a play.  Lewis was haunted; he was looking back, and something was gaining on him.  His history of misery is impressive.  His circumstances at the time made him right for despair, and he was like an evangelist spreading the gospel of panic.

Campaigns for exhumation in the name of justice or truth have never been successful, and now it’s a little late for the most astute cold case coroner.  So here’s my spin, which ignores much of Ambrose’s narrative of the end, as he seems to be extrapolating, right down to inventing dialogue).  Convinced that assassins dispatched by an enemy in Louisiana were hovering and that his mission was doomed, deep into self-medication with incompatible substances, fatigued and ashamed, he lay sleepless and fretful on his bison pelt pallet and aimed his pistols at his own head and heart, a strategy reasonable for a man whose earlier attempts had failed, a man who felt his soul was broken and who did not intend to fail again.

He was thirty-five.

Did Lewis attend the precursor of Washington and Lee before its financial boost from the former and the charismatic leadership of the latter?  If so, he left no mark, no signature.  But the dregs of his dust have long blended with earth beneath a monument in what is now called Lewis County, Tennessee.  An inscription on the south face of the stone records “his melancholy death,” but the indelible and inspiring story we still tell revives that part of his life spent suffering the deprivations of the wilderness, smoking in the lodges of Mandans and Shoshones, mapping and naming botanical specimens, hunting game and stars for celestial calculations, and enduring all manner of ailments, eating countless dogs and roots and boiled jerkins, and through it all anxious and haunted by his own unshakable inner shadow, nonetheless forever amazed.