A Zombie's History of the United States

by Worm Miller

  When Jefferson assumed office as the third president of the United States on March 4, 1801, the growing nation was home to 5,308,483 persons, living or otherwise animated. Two-thirds of these people lived within fifty miles of tidewater, and less than one out of ten lived west of the Appalachian Mountains, where only four roads lead and zombies and Indians were prevalent. Waterways were how heavy loads were transported, and thus the rivers, lakes, and seas dictated American commerce. A waterway connecting the Atlantic with the Pacific would prove invaluable, and many, including Jefferson, thought the still unexplored Missouri River might be the key. The task of determining this possibility would not be a small one. Even aside from the unknown elements of the terrain, those undertaking such an expedition would face potentially hostile Indians—and definitely hostile zombies.

  Jefferson knew just the man for the job.

  Meriwether Lewis was born in 1774 in Virginia and from the outset it would seem that zombies were to shape his destiny. In 1779, his father, William, died of pneumonia after zombies attacked his horse and he was forced to flee into a river to survive. His mother then moved the family to Georgia where young Lewis would form a bond with and love for nature that would ultimately catch the eye of Thomas Jefferson years later.

  According to Lewis family legend, when Lewis was eight or nine, he and some friends were returning home after a hunt when they were charged by an enormously fat zombie, hungry for brains. The other children climbed trees and hid, but young Lewis calmly raised his rifle and shot the zombie square between the eyes. Another such story concerns a zombie attack on the family’s cabin, which, lasting several days, forced the family to camp in the woods for safety. One night a foolish member of the camp started a fire, giving their position away. The zombies fell upon them. As grown men panicked and scurried around, only young Lewis had the wisdom to use the fire against the zombies and repel the attack.

  BURR, EMPEROR OF THE DEAD?

  Jefferson’s vice president, Aaron Burr, was no stranger to zombie-related controversy. On the hot seat after killing Alexander Hamilton in their infamous 1804 duel, Burr attempted the “dead defense” (a favorite excuse for those accused of murder at the time). Burr maintained that he was merely defending himself against a vicious, undead Hamilton. This excuse held little water considering that he shot Hamilton in the hip and that Hamilton died a slow, painful death over the course of twenty-four hours.

  The previous year, Burr met with the British minister to the United States, Anthony Merry, to try and persuade England to seize the territory just acquired in the Louisiana Purchase. According to Merry, Burr thought the area to be populated almost entirely by zombies. Like many others before and after him, Burr believed that zombies could be easily trained and controlled. Burr fancied an entire zombie empire “over which he would grandly lord, with those creeping things as his loyal subjects,” Merry recorded.

  The British government passed on the offer, though Burr continued with his secret machinations until 1806, when one of his co-conspirators betrayed him to Jefferson. Burr was brought up on federal charges of treason, though ultimately acquitted. In disgrace, Burr moved to Europe, where he tried to raise funds and support to establish a new zombie empire in Mexico, with no success. Burr died in 1836, never realizing his dreams of becoming Emperor of the Dead.

  In 1795, Lewis joined the U.S. Army to fight in the Whiskey Rebellion and the Ashe County Undead Purge, where he developed a curiosity for the possible scientific explanations for zombism. Since common belief still favored the Christian view that zombies were the work of the devil, Lewis incurred the mockery of many of his peers for his more secular theories. After drunkenly challenging his lieutenant to a duel during one such mocking, Lewis luckily evaded a court martial and was merely transferred to another detachment, where—as providence would have it—he served under one William Clark.

  Born in 1770, also in Virginia, Clark had a much different childhood. Unlike Lewis, who was raised a proper gentleman, Clark was of the lesser gentry. Self-educated, though well read, Clark joined the army in 1789 and was to serve largely in Indian affairs. Despite only being twenty-six years old, Clark retired from military life on July 4, 1796, due to poor health. He returned to his family plantation in Kentucky where he would peacefully remain, until the fateful day an old colleague suggested him for the adventure of a lifetime.

  Planning for Adventure

  If faced by superior forces of Undead so hearty as to stop the expedition, you must decline its further pursuit, and return. In the loss of yourselves, we should lose also the information you will have acquired. The Undead are to be cautioned wisely.

  —Thomas Jefferson, in a letter to Meriwether Lewis, 1803

  The Lewis and Clark Expedition was not Jefferson’s first attempt to stage such an exploration of the West. In 1793, Jefferson proposed to the Philosophical Society of Philadelphia that they sponsor a “daring adventurer to explore and map the geography and collect specimens of both natural and Unnatural history.” André Bache, a French botanist, was selected for the mission, though he only got as far as Kentucky before zombies ate him and half his expedition party. Jefferson knew next time he would need a better man.

  In 1801, now president, Jefferson asked Meriwether Lewis, whose family was known to Jefferson socially, to be his personal secretary. Lewis happily accepted. At Monticello, Jefferson taught Lewis to write better, read better, and think better; Jefferson was grooming Lewis for an expedition into the mysterious West. When Congress finally signed off on the Louisiana Purchase, they also gave Jefferson the funds he needed to stage the expedition, and Lewis was officially announced as its leader.

  To better shape his protégé, Jefferson enlisted the nation’s top minds to aid in Lewis’s education. He had Albert Gallatin, a well-known map collector, create a map specifically for Lewis that showed all that was then known of land west of the Mississippi. Dr. Rowan I. Brown, curator of the Philosophical Society’s literary vault, helped Lewis compile his traveling library, which included such titles as Dr. Benjamin Smith Barton’s Elements of Botany, Antoine Simor Le Page du Pratz’s History of Louisiana, Thomas Lewsirk’s A Practical Introduction to the Living Dead, Richard Kirwan’s Elements of Mineralogy, and even Jacob Kramer’s Mortuis Malleus (a testament to how little scholarly material was available on zombies at the time).

  A letter from June 1803 contained detailed instructions from Jefferson to Lewis on how to conduct his mission, listing, among other things:Other objects worthy of notice will be—

  the soil & face of the country it’s growth & vegetable

  productions, especially those not of the US;

  the animals of the country generally, & especially those

  not known in the US.

  the remains & accounts of any which may be deemed

  rare or extinct;

  volcanic appearances;

  the Undead, & their activities, do They differ from our

  own in the East, are there Undead of other species, like elk

  or beaver; send back live specimens if possible;

  monsters of any variety;

  Jefferson had great hopes for what sort of strange creatures might still be lurking off in the West. If zombies existed in North America, he felt that surely there must be other “unholy terrors lurking on the wilde continent.” Lewis might indeed encounter:…werwolves and other beast-Men or half-Men, vampyres, succubi, wood nymphs, bears evolved to speech, and even lake creatures—big and quite wickedly small… I would not think it impossible a vast civilization of the Undead have collected, developing themselves back to the life they knew to be as Men. A host of creatures chance taken up a common cause, voting a leader and creating laws for their damned world—wedding and birthing offspring.

  Albert Gallatin’s 1801 mapping of the territory west of the Mississippi.

  In his preparations, Lewis also met with Dr. Benjamin Rush, a member of the American Philosophical Society, a signer of the Declaration of Independenc
e, and the most eminent American physician of the day. This first meeting between Rush and Lewis, on May 17, 1803, was to have major ramifications for the future of both the undead and humans. As Rush later remembered it in a letter to his friend, former President John Adams:Lewis posed a query of me of the greatest challenge and Intrigue for my profession. Did I presume there a possibility to cure or revert those afflicted of a bite wound from the Wandering Dead?

  While there had been some experimental and anatomical studies done on zombies in the past, no reputable insti tution or individual had ever looked for a cure. Why would they? Zombism was not a disease, after all. It was the work of demonic forces. There were still those who believed that a truly pious man would be immune to a zombie’s bite, that those who became zombies were experiencing a kind of purgatory on earth. But Rush could not deny that Lewis’s theories were sound. As Lewis saw it, zombism was possibly not unlike rabies.

  ZOMBIE TRAPPERS

  While “zombie hunter” had quickly become a profession the moment Europeans settled in the New World, making a living capturing zombies “alive” did not surface as a career choice until the Age of Enlightenment brought a new interest in scientific pursuits. Animated subjects were now very valuable for dissection at universities, and equally prized as at-home curios for members of the upper class wishing to convey a sense of intellectualism.

  In the 1800s, as big cities were becoming increasingly successful at preventing zombism from spreading, zombie trapping became a necessity if one needed a specimen; one could not just round up zombies in the street anymore. Zombie trapping was an unglamorous but well-respected occupation. Unlike the pursuit of other large carnivorous game, zombie trappers had the unique distinction of needing to serve as their own bait. For this reason, most chose to work with a partner or in larger teams of four or five, with one or two members serving as the bait while the rest were stationed nearby with nets and ropes.

  Thomas Jefferson’s records show that he paid $275 for the two zombies he gave to Dr. Benjamin Rush, which in today’s dollars is around $4,000.

  Rush took up the challenge. Jefferson had two “live” zombies shipped in cages to Rush’s private laboratory as test subjects. “Frightening but fascinating,” Rush described his work to Adams. He was not to emerge again for several months, but once he did he would be carrying the key that would ultimately unlock a door to a whole new world of monsters.

  The more Lewis prepared, the clearer it became to him that he’d need a strong partner for the expedition. On June 19, 1803, he sent an invitation to William Clark. Despite only spending six months serving under Clark in the army, the two had gotten to know each other fairly well, and more importantly, Lewis knew that whatever areas of knowledge he was weak on, Clark was quite strong. Lewis offered Clark the position of co-commander, and Clark, who had grown bored handling his affairs on his family farm, quickly accepted.

  On August 31, the final nail went into the keelboat Lewis had commissioned for the journey. Dr. Benjamin Rush, at last emerging from his scientific hermitage, had made a hasty journey to Pittsburg to meet with Lewis before he departed. As Lewis describes in his journal:

  Dr. Rush believes we can alleve the Great Curse; he yet has no name for his discovery—though I have suggested Rush’s Miracle, if it truly suffices. It is coarse powder, which when afflicted by a bite one must ground into the fresh wound; this must be done straightaway Dr. Rush believes before the Creature’s essence has been absorbed; this is repeeted for the time which the wound must heal; then the victim will be as new; or is hoped; Dr. Rush admits nary time nor subjects for testing. I pray no attacks on the voyage; though I confess some eagerness to try it.

  The Expedition

  Slow travel. Many Indins. Many dead.

  —William Clark, journal entry, October, 1803

  After a slow crawl down the Ohio in the fall of 1803, the Corps of Discovery, as the expedition team was officially named by Lewis and Jefferson, made their winter camp on a 400-acre tract at the mouth of the Wood River in St. Louis, near where the mighty Mississippi and the equally mighty Missouri collide. Here they would wait for the ice to melt and for the transfer of sovereignty to officially pass from France to the United States, which would occur on March 10, 1804.

  During the winter, Lewis and Clark were keeping busy. Word had come down the river from traders that a particularly ferocious horde of zombies had been making life difficult upstream, so Clark began modifying the keelboat. He built lockers running along the boat’s sides that could be flipped up to make shields; when down they formed cat-walks for men pole-pushing to walk along. He also added a bronze cannon to the boat that could fire a one-pound ball, purchased four blunderbusses (large shotguns), which could be mounted along the sides, and purchased seven extra barrels of kerosene for firebombs. He also put the men through an intensive target-shooting regimen, to get them practiced at making headshots.

  While Clark took on zombie proofing the keelboat and getting the men in order, Lewis took the opportunity to send back his first shipment of specimens to Jefferson and the American Philosophical Society. Among other things, the package contained the head and brain of a zombie that had attacked Lewis while in the woods, which he found of scientific interest because the lower half of its skull was completely missing, its brain almost impossibly dangling out into the air, suspended crudely by sinew, vein, and the spinal cord. “How It found ability to still right its body and menace myself, I but wish I could fathom,” Lewis stated in the letter included with the specimen.

  Excerpt From Meriwether Lewis’s journal, April 1804. Presumably witnessed in North Dakota.

  Lewis was also making detailed sketches on the zombies he saw and jotting down page after page of observations:A diferent world here. I had heard tell that the West was thick with the Dead; pushed here it seems for the Great Cleanse; Dead here are as numerous as the deer; we see them on the river banks and roaming fields making groans to us; we see many Dead children, for God knows the reason; these Dead are all Indians, or once were rather; they seem to move with a slight more dexterity than those I have incountered before… This morn I came up on One that had steped on a fur trappers vice; so zellus in its hunger for me it keeping moving at me til it had ripped away its own foot by the force.

  On May 14, with both political and weather conditions now right, the Corps of Discovery officially began its expedition up the Missouri. Including Lewis and Clark, the departing party consisted of the zombie-proofed keelboat and two smaller pirogues, the Corps (comprised of twenty-five enlisted men), York (Clark’s slave), George Drouillard (a mixed-race Indian serving as the mission’s interpreter), Seaman (a huge Newfoundland dog Lewis had made the crew’s mascot), and five men who would temporarily travel with the expedition to the next winter camp, then return to St. Louis with Lewis’s specimens.

  That very morning, as the crew readied the boats, Clark voiced some ominous reservations about the trip and about Meriwether Lewis in his journal; self-educated Clark was a notoriously horrible speller: Fixing for a Start. Under a jentle brease. Men in high Spirits. Have enugh of nececary stores as we thought ourselves autherised to precure. Thogh not all as I think necssy for the multitud of Indians and Monsters tho which we must pass on our road across the Continent & &c. I fear Cpn Lewis to eger an enconter with the walking unDead. He is most unaffraid and always talking of his spesimens. He should be affraid tho.

  Sailing up the Missouri was tough, but the initial stages of the journey were without major incident. Clark was generally to be found on the keelboat, commanding the men, while Lewis walked along the shore to make study of what he saw. Even when camped, Lewis took long solitary walks, where he was supposedly collecting animal and plant specimens, and noting physical characteristics of the land and places for trading posts and fortifications. As Lewis’s excised journal entries reveal, he was becoming increasingly obsessed with zombies.

  For all the talk and readiness we have undertaken due the Dead; naught have I se
en any since Saint Louis; despite all my efforts. With great noise even do I make my walks; the better I presume to attract the Creatures; I talk loudly to myself; I try and look eatible; Yet nothing still.

  After encountering some fur traders on the river, Lewis purchased from them some “devil’s grease,” which was made from cooked down zombie fat. According to the traders, the grease could be spread on the skin and used as a bug repellent (useful on the mosquito-plagued river). Lewis excitedly began using the product, but most of the men were understandably unwilling to rub zombie fat on themselves.

  On July 8, four days after the first Independence Day celebration west of the Mississippi, the crew also had their first zombie scare. As Lewis records:While traversing a shalow bend in the river a troupe of five Dead came at us from out of brush on Shore; the Men hastened the boats faster, but too much ground to cover; Clark loosed the canon at One taking the creatures head with a single ball. Clark’s clever shields did ther magic allowing time for knife and axe to be given to the Deads necks and brains; one of the devils was missing the entirety of its face; most extraordinary; By what sense do it govern? Labiche and Cruzatte, the mixed-bloods taken on at Saint Charles are well practiced at rivering against such forces; using irontipped pole, they made fast work of the Things.

  If ever there was a fun-and-games portion of the journey, it was now over.