Jill, official oldest daughter of NewMexiKen, dropped by the grave of Meriwether Lewis on her recent road trip. She took this photo [click it to enlarge]. It got me to investigating the controversy around Lewis’s death and I found this article at Salon Ivory Tower. Here’s the beginning to draw you into the Meriwether Lewis murder mystery:
In the afternoon of Oct. 10, 1809, Meriwether Lewis rode up to an inn called Grinder’s Stand, a small log cabin in the Tennessee mountains on the Natchez Trace, the old pioneer road between Natchez, Miss., and Nashville, Tenn. He was traveling to Washington, where he hoped to clear up debts to the War Department he had incurred while serving as the first American governor of the Louisiana Territory. Then he planned to deliver the priceless journals of his great expedition, which had come to a triumphant conclusion just three years earlier, to his Philadelphia publishers.
The 35-year-old explorer appears to have been in a desperate state. One month earlier, on Sept. 11, he had written his will. At about the same time, according to a letter written by the commander of a fort where Lewis had stayed on his trip, Lewis had twice tried to kill himself, either by jumping overboard or by shooting himself, while traveling down the Mississippi River by boat. The commander, Capt. Gilbert Russell, wrote that he had been forced to hold Lewis, who had been drinking heavily, on 24-hour suicide watch at the fort for a week. Lewis’ companion on the trip, James Neelly, later told Thomas Jefferson that Lewis “appeared at times deranged in mind.” Historians have speculated that Lewis may have been tormented by manic depression, or even suffering from syphilis.
Lewis asked Mrs. Grinder, whose husband was absent, whether there was room in her inn. Neelly had stayed behind to round up two stray horses and was planning on meeting Lewis at the next residence inhabited by white people. Except for two servants, who were trailing behind, burdened by heavy trunks, Lewis was alone.
According to the conventional scholarly view, later that night, Lewis, after tormentedly pacing in his room for several hours and talking out loud, shot himself once in the head, grazing his skull, and then again in the chest. Still alive, he may or may not have tried to finish the job by cutting himself from head to toe with his razor blades. He died shortly after sunrise on Oct. 11.
On the face of it, there would not seem to be much reason to question this account. But there has long been a dissenting body of thought that holds that Lewis was not the victim of a suicide, but of a murder.