The Meriwether Murder

by Malcolm Shuman

“That’s scary.”

  “I have to think about it. I don’t know what David would say. And Marilyn hates me.”

  “No, she doesn’t. She’s just protective. And David knows we’re weak when it comes to historic archaeology.”

  “I don’t know if it would work,” she said.

  “Probably not,” I agreed.

  “So let’s keep it the way it is now.”

  “Right.”

  “For the time being.”

  By the time we crossed into Alabama it was almost three. We were passing limestone outcrops now, jutting out from where the road had been carved from the sides of the hills, and I tried to imagine what it had been like for the fevered rider that October 1809. What were pleasantly rolling hills to us must have been incredible obstacles to him. And the multicolored leaves—had he had time to appreciate their beauty, or had his imagination given them a more sinister significance?

  “Almost there,” Pepper said and I opened my eyes.

  I looked down at my watch. Four-twenty. My God, I’d been asleep almost an hour and a half.

  Pepper held up the Park Service map.

  “We’re almost at Dogwood Mudhole,” she said.

  I straightened in my seat and looked out the window.

  Hills, exposed limestone, gray sky.

  I rolled down my window and breathed in the air from outside. It was cool, with the first nip of fall.

  “Did she say why she picked this place for us to meet?” Pepper asked.

  “No. But there’s probably a reason,” I said. “She sounds like somebody with firm ideas.”

  “Crazy, in other words.”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  I checked the map. “We seem to be following the old Trace exactly now,” I said. “The Dogwood Mudhole ought to be right up here in a mile or two.”

  “I hope she’s there.”

  “It is a long way to come,” I admitted.

  A Park Service sign advised us that the Dogwood Mudhole stop was just ahead and Pepper slowed and pulled into a semicircular turnoff on the left. A two-year old gray Mazda with Tennessee plates was parked against the curb. It looked empty.

  We stopped and got out.

  A sign advised us that the real Dogwood Mudhole was an impassable mire located a mile to the south on a part of the old Trace that was off the modern parkway, and that this was as close as the parkway got. For all the Park Service signage, there was nothing to see but trees and a barbed-wire fence.

  I edged over to the Mazda to see if there was someone sleeping inside, but our first impression had been correct, and there was nothing on the seat or the dash that gave a clue as to who its owner might be.

  “You think this is her car?” Pepper asked.

  I shrugged. “Beats me. But if it is, I don’t know where she is.”

  In answer there was a crunching of leaves and we turned to the wall of trees in front of us.

  A few seconds later a tiny figure appeared, mottled with shadow. It kept coming, stepping deliberately over a log, and then emerged into the failing sunlight.

  “I assume you are the people Shelby sent?” the figure asked in a waspish voice and I knew we had met Dorcas Drew.

  I offered a hand, which she took quickly and then released.

  “We weren’t sure if this was your car—” I began but she cut me off.

  “I don’t know who else you think would be out here at this time of day. I was doing some exploring. Walking around. As the sign says, this is really just a faux reference point. The real mudhole is a mile away.”

  I saw Pepper smile.

  “And you …?” Dorcas Drew asked, turning to my companion.

  Pepper introduced herself and our guide nodded. I gave her a closer look: Her short gray hair was clipped as closely as a boy’s and the gold rings in her ears touched her shoulders. Her blue jeans were clean and pressed but were hardly new, as if she used them often, and her blouse was a simple gray slip-over shirt with a pocket. Hiking boots, dark glasses, and a fanny pack completed her wardrobe, giving the impression of someone who was as comfortable in the woods as in library stacks.

  “Well,” Dorcas Drew said. “I suppose you want to know why I asked you to meet me here instead of at the monument.”

  “We figured you had reasons,” I said and knew I’d made the right response.

  “Indeed. Dogwood Mudhole—the real one, south of here—was a stopping point on the Trace, because it was so hard to cross in the rainy times. Of course, it would have been relatively dry when the governor and his companions arrived, but they stopped, nevertheless. The mudhole”—she swept the woods with her hand—“is where the governor and the others camped the night before the governor died at Grinder’s Stand.”

  “Ahhh,” Pepper and I said together.

  “That is,” our informant told us, “if you believe Major Neelly.”

  “The Indian agent,” Pepper said.

  Dorcas Drew jerked her head. “Yes. The man who so conveniently appeared at Fort Pickering and agreed to accompany the governor over the Trace all the way to Nashville.”

  “You don’t seem to hold him in high regard,” I said.

  “I neither hold him in high nor low regard,” Dorcas said. “I can only report what information we have: He appeared fortuitously, but such things happen. In Neelly’s case one must wonder, but no one can ever know.”

  “You mean there’s something more to it?” Pepper asked.

  Dorcas Drew’s little mouth twisted as if she’d tasted something sour.

  “Neelly had only been Indian agent since August. His first important assignment was to transport a prisoner to Nashville for trial. This man, George Lanehart by name, had committed a robbery in a Chickasaw village. The man he’d robbed was an influential Englishman who owned a nearby plantation. But Neelly, instead of taking this Lanehart in hand, paid ninety dollars to a second party to transport Lanehart for him and, instead, headed for Fort Pickering, a hundred miles to the northwest.” The little woman’s mouth was puckered with visible disgust now. “Neelly only made eighty-three dollars a month as Indian agent.”

  “That is a little odd,” I admitted.

  “No odder,” she said, “than the refusal by General Wilkinson to grant Captain Russell leave from Fort Pickering to accompany the governor to Nashville.”

  “Wilkinson again,” I said.

  “Yes. The man who nominated James Neelly for his job as Indian agent to the Chickasaws.”

  “Then you think—” Pepper began but Dorcas held up a hand.

  “What I think is unimportant. Now that you have come here, it is more important that you try to put yourself in the governor’s place and see things through his eyes. Try to forget this modern highway and these ridiculous Park Service signs and imagine things as they were then, when the governor passed this way.”

  “Must’ve been pretty lonely,” Pepper said.

  “Yes, but not as much as you might think by reading some of the drivel that’s been written about this place. In the early days, when the governor came this way, the stands were about every day’s ride. But the land above the Duck River was ceded by the Chickasaws in 1805 and the whites moved in very quickly. Homesteads were spread through the valley every five miles or so. Grinder’s was a little below that, on Little Swan Creek, in the Indian lands, but that hadn’t stopped settlers from coming into the area. So you could reach a neighbor in a couple of hours by horseback. That’s important to remember.”

  She turned abruptly and started to unlock her car door.

  “Now we’ll take the last journey.”

  Pepper and I looked at each other.

  “I mean we will take the parkway to Grinder’s Stand and the governor’s grave. Needless to say, it isn’t exactly the route the governor followed, but there is one point where a section of the old Trace leaves the highway and we’ll follow that. I’ll go ahead of you slowly. When we go into the woods, try to envision that evening almost two hundred years ago.”


  Pepper slipped back behind the wheel and started the engine.

  “She’s really into this, isn’t she?”

  I nodded, but before I could say anything, Dorcas Drew had backed out her car and was heading onto the parkway.

  We came to the old Trace detour in about eight miles and she pulled up at the side of the road and rolled down her window.

  “You should take this part of the road alone. One car is bad enough, two will absolutely ruin the effect. It’s only two miles and I’ll meet you at the end of the detour.”

  Without waiting for a reply she raised her window and wheeled back onto the highway.

  Pepper turned right, onto a narrow one-lane track that led into the forest.

  The foliage closed around us and I felt isolated from the modern world. The trail rose slowly and then curved along the top of a ridge. It was five now and the shadows had merged, forming a twilight broken only by occasional glimpses of a gray sky.

  “It is kind of eerie,” Pepper said as we crept along the dirt path, our tires crunching gravel and sticks. I ran my window down and scanned the depths of the forest, where I felt eyes staring out at me.

  “I can imagine how it would have been if you were feverish,” she said. “Lewis might have seen all sorts of things.”

  We came to an overlook, where the valley spread before us. The sky was a ruddy color, as if the sun had been plunged into an ocean.

  “He would have been hurrying,” I said. “He wouldn’t have wanted to pitch camp in the dark.”

  We started downward, with a dropoff on our right. Five minutes later we reemerged onto the tar top. The gray Mazda was parked on the side of the road, waiting for us. Without so much as an acknowledgment, it pulled onto the parkway as we approached and Pepper followed.

  We drove without speaking for five miles, each of us immersed in our thoughts, and then we saw the sign at the same time, advertising the Meriwether Lewis National Monument.

  The Mazda gave a left turn signal and disappeared, and Pepper turned after it.

  For some reason I felt my heart thumping, as if I were on the way to a funeral.

  But why? It had all happened so long ago. The man Dorcas Drew so primly referred to as the governor was dead, and regardless of where he was buried, he wasn’t likely to come back to haunt anybody.

  Besides, this was a national monument, controlled by the National Park Service. It had probably been so rearranged and sanitized by the government the governor had served that there would be little left to remind the visitor of his presence.

  Then we swerved left and I saw it in the twilight, a single cabin in a clearing, and my heart started to pound faster.

  The clearing was totally deserted, the parking area vacant.

  Two hundred yards beyond the cabin an obelisk pointed a single granite finger at the darkening sky. And as I watched, a rider materialized from the forest, plodding toward us along the path.

  TWENTY

  We stared, mesmerized, the motor still running, until Dorcas Drew got out of her car and walked over to where we had stopped.

  “I wish those yahoos down in the valley would show some respect,” she complained, nodding at the man on horseback. “This is sacred ground.”

  I saw now that the horseman wore jeans and a plaid shirt. He continued around the track, past the flagpole with its drooping colors, and nodded a greeting as he passed us, heading in the direction from which we’d come.

  When he was gone, the place was deserted except for ourselves.

  “So this is it,” Pepper said, looking over at the log cabin to our left.

  “That?” Dorcas laughed. “Hardly. What you see here is a modern replica. The central breezeway—the dogtrot—has been filled in and the building is oriented toward the parking area instead of toward the old Trace path.” She shook her head disapprovingly. “Everything is wrong.”

  I stared over at the cabin. A sign said the room on the left side was the ranger’s office and the right room was a museum.

  “I wouldn’t bother looking in there,” Dorcas said. “They don’t have anything a sixth grader doesn’t already know. The real Grinder cabin was over here.” She pointed, and we got out and followed her to a spot a few feet north of the replica building. Here, a sign said, were the remains of the Grinders’ original building and when we looked I could see stone foundations, almost covered by grass.

  “The cabin,” Dorcas explained, “would have faced the other way, because the old Trace was on the other side, about a hundred feet away, in the direction we’re facing. It ran roughly north and south, just along the west edge of the clearing, and passed just beyond the monolith over there.”

  She marched over to one of the foundation stones and nudged at it with her foot.

  “The stable or barn was probably about a hundred yards to the south, about where we turned in from the road. We’re standing roughly where Mrs. Grinder stood that day when she saw the governor come out of the woods and ask for a place to stay.”

  Pepper crossed her hands over her body and I could see she was shivering. I put my arm around her. Dorcas checked us out of the corner of her eye and I thought I saw the hint of a smile.

  “So we’re standing right about where it happened,” Pepper said.

  “Yes,” Dorcas said. “We are standing in the very place where the governor was shot.”

  She pointed ahead of us, into the gloom. “According to one account, he crawled all the way back to the road and was found there the next morning by a post rider named Robert Smith.”

  “I haven’t heard that version,” I said.

  “No. There are local versions that our Major Neelly and Mrs. Priscilla Grinder somehow omitted.”

  “You sound as if you suspect their account,” Pepper said.

  “Accounts—plural. Priscilla Grinder gave three different versions over the years. The first was to Neelly, the next morning. The second was to a friend of the governor’s, Alexander Wilson, who visited Grinder’s Stand a year later and paid Mr. Grinder to take care of the grave.”

  “And the third?” I asked.

  “To an unknown teacher who published it in a newspaper in 1845.”

  “What are the differences?” Pepper asked.

  “In the first version, the one Neelly reported to Jefferson, Lewis is restless, hardly touches his food, paces back and forth talking to himself, and then goes into the sleeping cabin alone. Mrs. Grinder has given him the family cabin and taken herself, her children, and her servants to the kitchen cabin, across the breezeway. Lewis’s man Pernier and Neelly’s servant retire to the stable, a hundred yards behind the house. Priscilla is then awakened in the early hours by two pistol shots. Pernier and Neelly’s man come running from the stable and they and Mrs. Grinder find the governor on the floorboard, in agony. He tells Pernier he’s shot himself and asks for water. The servant gives the governor water from a gourd, but the governor expires soon afterward and some time after that Neelly arrives and sees to his burial.”

  I nodded. “And the second version?”

  Dorcas folded her arms. “That’s the one Priscilla Grinder gave to Alexander Wilson in 1811. In this one, when the two servants ride up shortly after the governor arrived, he asks Pernier where his gunpowder is, but whatever Pernier replies, Priscilla doesn’t understand. The governor is restless and when he goes to his cabin, he paces for several hours, talking to himself as if he’s reciting a speech he plans to make—which may, indeed, have been the case. Then, all at once, she hears a pistol report, the governor cries out, and she hears another shot.”

  I looked down at the little scatter of stones that were all that marked the Grinder dwelling.

  “The next thing she hears is the governor scratching at her door, begging for water. The logs were unplastered so she could see between them, into the yard. There, the poor man has fallen against a tree stump. Then he crawls over to a bucket and scrapes in it for water, but the bucket is dry.”

  “You mean sh
e didn’t give him any?” Pepper asked, amazed.

  “In this account, Priscilla is too afraid to leave her quarters and waits until daybreak to send her children to the barn for the servants. The servants run in and find the governor with a wound in the side and with his brains exposed from a head wound. He begs them to take his rifle and finish the job, but, of course, they don’t. He dies at sunup.”

  Pepper muttered something under her breath. “And this woman lived on the frontier?”

  “You aren’t the first to have commented on Priscilla Grinder’s timidity,” Dorcas declared.

  “And the third version?” I asked.

  “Stranger still. In this one, reported almost forty years after the event, she says that the governor had no sooner arrived that evening than two or three men rode up. The governor pulled out his pistols and the men turned and rode away.”

  “Bizarre,” Pepper said.

  “It gets stranger still,” Dorcas said. “In this version, the governor and the two servants retire to the same room. The governor has been acting so strangely that Priscilla asks Pernier to take away his pistols, but Pernier tells her it doesn’t matter, because the governor has no powder for them. Priscilla and her children go to sleep in the kitchen and in the early hours hear three shots.”

  “Three shots?” I asked.

  “Three. And she hears someone fall and cry, ‘Oh, Lord. Congress relieve me.’”

  “Congress?” I snorted. “I’d want doctors, not politicians.”

  “Precisely,” Dorcas said. “Once more, she sees the governor crawling around, searching for water, and once more the servants arrive: It turns out they haven’t been with him after all, but in the stable, as in the other versions. Pernier, the governor’s servant, is wearing the governor’s gold watch and the governor’s clothes, and the dying governor is wearing old and tattered clothes.”

  “Jeez,” Pepper said. “You mean Pernier stole—”

  But Dorcas held up a hand. “The governor is brought to the cabin and when Priscilla asks why he did it, he says, ‘If I had not done it someone else would.’ He lingers long enough to be seen alive by some of the neighbors. Apparently he revives enough to try to cut his throat but is prevented. And finally, that morning, he dies—all before Major Neelly appears.”