“Well,” Lewis replied, “do not suffer yourself to be separated from me in the public opinion; When we meet in public, let us, at least address each other with cordiality.”
Bates agreed, though he complained to his brother that Lewis had “used me badly.”
Then Bates demanded that Clark be brought into the conversation, to settle the business about Lewis’s appointment of Clark as his agent. When Clark arrived, Bates told the two men that the laws “expressly provided” that he, Secretary Bates, should be the governor’s agent when the governor was traveling.
“I will suffer no interferences &c. &c. &c.” he declared. To his brother, Bates remarked, “How unfortunate for this man [Lewis] that he resigned his commission in the army: His habits are altogether military & he never can I think succeed in any other profession.”10
On July 16, Bates wrote the secretary of the Treasury to complain about Lewis’s behavior. It seemed Lewis had ordered Bates to print the laws of the territory and charge it to the secretary’s office. Bates had refused, but ultimately relented in response to Lewis’s repeated order; now he wanted the Treasury to compensate him.11
By July 25, Bates was able to boast to an ally, “Our Gov. Lewis, with the best intentions in the world, is, I am fearful, losing ground. . . . He has talked for these 12 Mos. of leaving the country—Every body thinks now that he will positively go, in a few weeks.”12
•
In early August, Lewis received a short note from a clerk in the Department of State named R. S. Smith. It referred to a draft Lewis had signed on February 10 in favor of one Peter Provenchere for $18.50 for translating the laws of the territory into French for publication. Although Lewis had no authorization to pay for such services, he explained, “I did not hesitate to cause the copies of those laws to be made out [for a felony trial]. I was compelled to take the course which I have, or suffer a fellow to escape punishment.”
Now the bill came back to him, with a note from clerk Smith: “The bill mentioned in this Letter having been drawn without authority it cannot be paid at this Dept.”13
Lewis was shaken by the refusal. “This occurrence has given me infinite concern as from it the fate of other bills, drawn for similar purposes, to a considerable amount cannot be mistaken,” he wrote. “This rejection cannot fail to impress the public mind unfavourably with respect to me, nor is this consideration more painful than the censure which must arise in the Mind of the Executive from my having drawn public monies without authority. A third, and not less embarrassing circumstance attending the transaction is that my private funds are entirely incompetent to meet these bills, if protested.”14
•
Secretary Bates thought of himself as a long-suffering, honest, misunderstood man guarding the public treasury. He sent a series of complaints about Lewis’s drafts and orders to Washington. Sometime that summer, Lewis struck back; as Bates put it, “he took it into his head to disavow certain statements which I had made, by his order, from the Secretary’s Office.
“This was too much—I waited on him,—told him my wrongs—that I could not bear to be treated in such a manner.”
“Take your own course,” Lewis replied.
“I shall, Sir,” Bates fired back. “And I shall come, in future to the Executive Office when I have business at it.”
Shortly thereafter, a ball was held in St. Louis. Bates was present when Lewis entered. Bates recorded: “He drew his chair close to mine—There was a pause in the conversation—I availed myself of it—arose and walked to the opposite side of the room.”
Lewis also rose—according to Bates, “evidently in passion.” Lewis retired into an adjoining room and sent a servant for Clark. He told Clark that Bates had “treated him with contempt & insult and that he could not suffer it to pass.” He asked him to call Bates into the room.
Clark refused, according to Bates because “he foresaw that a Battle must have been the consequence of our meeting.”
Some days later, Clark called on Bates to ask that he patch things up with Lewis.
“NO!” Bates replied. “The Governor has told me to take my own course and I shall step a high and a proud Path. He has injured me, and he must undo that injury.
“You come,” Bates told Clark, “as my friend, but I cannot separate you from Governor Lewis—You have trodden the ups & the Downs of life with him and it appears to me that these proposals are made solely for his convenience.”15
•
This unseemly squabbling certainly did Lewis’s mood no good, but it was a minor affair compared with what happened to him on August 18. That day, he received a heart-stopping letter from Secretary of War Eustis.
Dated July 19, it was written in the deadly passive voice of the born bureaucrat. Eustis said that, after his department had reluctantly approved Lewis’s contract with the Missouri River Fur Company for seven thousand dollars, “it was not expected that any further advances or any further agency would be required on the part of the United States.” Lewis should therefore “not be surprized” that his draft of May 13 for an additional five hundred dollars for presents for the Indians “has not been honored.”
That meant Lewis was personally responsible for the money.
Eustis went on, “It has been usual to advise the Government of the United States when expenditures to a considerable amount are contemplated in the Territorial Government.” When 125 men are to be enlisted for “a military expedition to a point and purpose not designated, which expedition is stated to combine commercial as well as military objects . . . it is thought the Government might, without injury to the public interests, have been consulted.”
In fact, Lewis had been explicit about the purpose of the expedition, although he had not cleared the commercial aspects of it with Washington. Eustis seized on that point: “As the object & destination of this Force [beyond the Mandans] is unknown, and more especially as it combines Commercial purposes, so it cannot be considered as having the sanction of the Government of the United States, or that they are responsible for consequences.”
Eustis closed with a chilling remark: “The President has been consulted and the observations herein contained have his approval.” The president, of course, was Madison, not Jefferson—now retired at Monticello and unable to protect Lewis.16
•
In any event, Jefferson was unhappy with Lewis. He was slow to censure and ready to give Lewis the benefit of the doubt, but his patience was wearing thin. On August 16, he sent Lewis a letter of introduction for an English botanist coming to St. Louis on a “botanising tour.”
Meriwether Lewis’s journal. (Courtesy American Philosophical Society)
Then Jefferson wrote: “I am very often applied to know when your work will begin to appear; and I have so long promised copies to my literary correspondents in France, that I am almost bankrupt in their eyes. I shall be very happy to recieve from yourself information of your expectations on this subject. Every body is impatient for it.”
Perhaps to soften the blow, Jefferson added some political gossip and commentary on foreign affairs. He said Lewis’s friends in Virginia “are well, & have been long in expectation of seeing you. I shall hope in that case to possess a due portion of you at Monticello, where I am at length enjoying the never before known luxury of employing myself for my own gratification only.” He asked Lewis to present his best wishes to Clark “and be assured yourself of my constant & unalterable affections.”17
Lewis never replied, or made any known mention of the letter; nor did he explain to anyone, even Clark, the cause of the delay in preparing the journals for publication.
•
Lewis did reply to Eustis, in a letter of August 18, the day he got it. He said Eustis’s letter of July 19 “is now before me. The feelings it excites are truly painful.” He protested that he had accompanied every draft for a public expenditure with an explicit statement of the purpose and insisted, “I have never received a penny of public Money.” He added, “To th
e correctness of this statement, I call my God to witness.
“I have been informed Representations have been made against me,” Lewis went on. What those “Representations” might have been is not known, but can be surmised from his protests against them; nor is the source known, but it can be guessed that it was Bates. Evidently Bates—or someone else—had spread a story that the Missouri River Fur Company intended to go into the Rocky Mountains, beyond the Continental Divide, into territory not belonging to the United States, possibly with the intent of setting up a new country, á la Aaron Burr and General Wilkinson.
Whatever the specifics, Lewis said he could not correct by letter “the impressions which I fear, from the tenor of your letter, the Government entertain with respect to me.” Therefore, he would leave St. Louis in a week, going by way of New Orleans to Washington. “I shall take with me my papers, which I trust when examined, will prove my firm and steady attachment to my Country.”
The expedition to return Big White had only that object, he went on, “and in a commercial point of view, . . . they [the company] intend only, to hunt and trade on the waters of the Misoury and Columbia Rivers within the rockey Mountains and the Planes bordering those Mountains on the east side—and that they have no intention with which I am acquainted, to enter the Dominions, or do injury to any foreign Power.
“Be assured Sir, that my Country can never make ‘A Burr’ of me—She may reduce me to Poverty; but she can never sever my Attachment from her.”
Word that the government had refused to honor Lewis’s drafts had spread round town within hours of the arrival of Eustis’s letter (Bates again?). Lewis informed Eustis that the protested bills “have effectually sunk my Credit; brought in all my private debts, amounting to about $4,000.” He had handed over to his creditors the deeds to the land he had purchased around St. Louis, as security, and pointed out that “the best proof which I can give of my Integrity, as to the use or expenditure of the public Monies, the Government will find at a future day, by the poverty to which they have now reduced me.”18
•
Lewis spent the next few days with Clark. They agreed that both of them should go to Washington. Clark was of course deeply involved in the Missouri River Fur Company and in any case had other governmental matters to take up with the War Department, including protested drafts of his brother George Rogers Clark (which had ruined him). Lewis would go by water, Clark overland.
They spent much time attempting to put Lewis’s accounts in order. They made up a list of what Lewis owed; it came to some twenty-nine hundred dollars, exclusive of his land debts.19 Lewis sent ahead to New Orleans the land warrant for sixteen hundred acres he had been given by Congress, to be sold, he hoped, for two dollars an acre. He wanted the money deposited in a New Orleans bank “for the benefit of my creditors.” He returned to Auguste Chouteau much of the land he had bought from him on credit. He looked around for anything he had that could be sold; in Clark’s memorandum book, Lewis wrote, “The negroe boy Tom belongs to my mother, and therefore cannot be sold on my account.”20
The most valuable item he possessed, by far, was the journals, worth a thousand times and more what the land warrant would bring. Those he would never sell.
Lewis had told Eustis that he would be departing in a week, but it actually took him three weeks to get going. He packed all his belongings, including the journals, which had been continuously in his possession since the end of the expedition. He told Clark he would go to Philadelphia to get the publication process started.
His baggage contained, among many other items, a sea-otter skin, a pair of red slippers, a silver tumbler, a tomahawk, 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 bundle of medicines, a broadcloth coat, a pistol case, three knives, a sword, a “pike blade” with a broken shaft (his espontoon?), and all his official papers.21 He got off on September 4.22
•
Some days after Lewis left St. Louis, one of the land commissioners in the territory, Clement Penrose, accused Bates of being responsible for “the mental derangement of the Governor,” which Penrose said was due to “the barbarous conduct of the Secretary.”
Bates confronted Penrose after a meeting of the Board of Commissioners. He charged Penrose with spreading slanders against him and said, “I pledge my word of Honor, that if you ever again bark at my heels, I will spurn you like a Puppy.” Later that day, he wrote Penrose a record of the conversation.
“You said that I have been, and am the enemy of the Governor—and that I would be very willing to fill that office myself. I told you this morning that it was false—and I repeat that it is an impudent stupidity in you to persist in the assertion. . . . In return for the personal allusions with which you have honored me, I tender to you, my most hearty contempt.”23
In another letter that week, Bates wrote that “all feeling minds are, in different degrees, affected by the unhappy situation of Governor Lewis, and would feel a painful reluctance in contributing to his mortifications.”24
Lewis had borrowed again, enough money to purchase a considerable medical chest. He jotted in his account book that he had bought pills for “billious fever, pills of opium and tartar,” and others.
The Missouri Gazette had reported that Governor Lewis “set off in good health for New Orleans on his way to the Federal City.” The emphasis on his health had more an ominous than a reassuring ring.
•
The day after Lewis’s departure, Clark wrote his brother Jonathan, describing Lewis’s situation and mood during his last week in St. Louis:
Govr. L I may Say is ruined by Some of his Bills being protested for a Considerable Sum which was for Moneys paid for Printing the Laws and Expenses in Carrying the mandan home all of which he has vouchrs for. . . .
I have not Spent Such a day as yesterday for maney years. . . . I 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 honester man in Louisiana nor one who had pureor motives than Govr. Lewis. if his mind had been at ease I Should have parted Cherefuly. . . .
I think all will be right and he will return with flying Colours to this Country—prey do not mention this about the Govr. excupt Some unfavourable or wrong Statement is made—I assure you that he has done nothing dishonourable, and all he has done will Come out to be much to his Credit as I am fully purswaded.25
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
Last Voyage
September 3–October 11, 1809
The Mississippi River valley in early September 1809 was hot, humid, buggy. Lewis’s boat proceeded slowly, since it was necessary for the crew to rest during the middle part of the day. He was in terrible condition, possibly suffering from a malaria attack, certainly in a deep depression that caused him unbearable pain. Twice he tried to kill himself—whether by jumping overboard or with his pistol is not known—and had to be restrained by the crew.1
On September 11, he wrote his last will and testament: “I bequeath all my estate, real and personal, to my Mother, Lucy Marks, after my private debts are paid, of which a statement will be found in a small minute book deposited with Pernia, my servant.”2
Lewis arrived at Chickasaw Bluffs, then the site of Fort Pickering, today the site of Memphis, Tennessee, on September 15. Captain Gilbert Russell was the commander at the fort. On being informed of Lewis’s suicide attempts, he “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.”3
Lewis was drinking heavily, using snuff frequently, taking his pills, talking wildly, telling lies. He to
ld Russell (as reported in the November 15, 1809, Washington Advertiser) that all the work on the journals had been completed and they were ready for the press. Apparently that was his way of deflecting embarrassing questions about the project’s progress. Russell deprived him of liquor, allowing him only “claret & a little white wine.”4
The day after his arrival, Lewis wrote President Madison. The letter was garbled, although he managed to make his point. It needs to be quoted in full.I
I arrived here {yesterday} about {2 Ock} P.M. {yesterday} very much exhausted from the heat of the climate, but having {taken} medicine feel much better this morning. My apprehension for the heat of the lower country and my fear of the original papers relative to my voyage to the Pacific ocean falling into the hands of the British has induced me to change my rout and proceed by land through the state of Tennisee to the City of washington. I bring with me duplicates of my vouchers for public expenditures &c. which when fully explained, or reather the general view of the circumstances under which they were made I flatter myself {that} they {will} receive both {sanction &} approbation {and} sanction.
Provided my health permits no time shall be lost in reaching Washington. My anxiety to pursue and to fullfill the duties incedent to {the} internal arangements incedent to the government of Louisiana has prevented my writing you {as} more frequently. {Mr. Bates is left in charge.} Inclosed I herewith transmit you a copy of the laws of the territory of Louisiana. I have the honour to be with the most sincere esteem your Obt. {and very humble} Obt. and very humble Servt.”5
Over the following five days, Lewis showed no sign of improvement (Russell apparently had not deprived him of his medicines). Russell maintained a twenty-four-hour suicide watch. Finally, Russell reported, “on the sixth or seventh day all symptoms of derangement disappeared and he was completely in his senses,” although he was “considerably reduced and debilitated.”6
He was also ashamed of himself. Russell reported that “he acknowledged very candidly to me after his recovery” that he had been drinking to excess. Lewis said he was resolved “never to drink any more spirits or use snuff again.”7
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