by Paul Schrag
After the Spanish left the picture Wilkinson devised a new plot with then Vice President Aaron Burr to organize an unofficial invasion of Texas. His plans failed to manifest again and again as the playing field changed overnight due to events in Europe and the Louisiana Purchase.
Spain could no longer pay attention to the colonies thanks to Napoleon’s fiery invasion. But when one door closes, another opens. At least it was so for Wilkinson, who, after the Louisiana Purchase, was appointed governor of the new territory by President Thomas Jefferson. While serving as governor Wilkinson sent secret reconnaissance missions deep into Texas territory. Wilkinson was looking for gold and new routes into Mexico. He was going to invade and overthrow the Spanish with or without support from Congress, and he needed all the resources he could acquire. One way of getting the bullets he needed was to secure the large lead mines found south of St. Louis.
Congress felt that the immense fortunes to be made in lead mining operations south of St. Louis could pay for the Louisiana Purchase within five years. But the land speculators who had been conniving with the Spanish for control of these mines weren’t about to give them up so easily. It conveniently happened that the man appointed to govern these mines for the United States was the treacherous General Wilkinson.
Wilkinson’s right-hand man was another chief troublemaker for President Jefferson. Probably the most feared man in the territory, John Smith T. was an aggressive land swindler looking to acquire all the lead mines he came across. He was reputed to have killed fifteen men in duels and always carried four pistols, a Bowie knife, and a rifle. He could provide the remaining lead needed for Wilkinson’s invasion of Mexico, but before they could make the move Jefferson removed Wilkinson from his gubernatorial duties.
Wilkinson was furious over his demotion when, after the capture of Aaron Burr, fingers began pointing in Wilkinson’s direction as a coconspirator. Wilkinson’s removal, and the government’s subsequent clamp-down on the mines, left the Louisiana territories in a chaotic state. Crime and corruption were everywhere, and the whole area needed to be cleaned out.
This was the obstacle facing Lewis as he prepared to succeed Wilkinson as the new governor of Louisiana. But Lewis was idealistic and optimistic and reportedly looked forward to taking out the trash corrupting the Louisiana territory.
Strangely, Lewis then fell silent for an extended period, much to the dismay of Jefferson and others who awaited the publication of his journals.5 Various theories have emerged regarding the delay, including that Lewis was given time to recuperate by Jefferson; that he was actively searching for a wife; and that he fell victim to alcoholism, disease, or some other debilitation. Scholars generally concede that a clear answer to what happened to Lewis during this time is unlikely to ever emerge.
This mysterious delay also resulted in scores of volumes of the journals going missing. Gary Moulton, professor and editor of one volume of the published journals of Lewis and Clark, suggests that throughout the years growing evidence indicates that much of what Lewis and Clark wrote about the westward journey was lost.
Over the years, numerous documents of the expedition have come to light, some in the most unexpected places. . . . These discoveries seem to support the notion of other lost items yet to be found. No hope of discovery ranks so high as the hope of finding Meriwether Lewis’s diaries, which would fill the large gaps in his writing during and about the expedition.6
What those journal entries contained, and what truths they may have revealed about the fate of their author, remains a mystery.
The other strange anomaly that has come to light are the mysterious gaps in Lewis’s journals, which are extensive and have vexed scholars for two centuries. Lewis made no journal entries during the first portion of the journey, for example, from May 14, 1804, until April 7, 1805, when the corps left Fort Mandan. This nearly yearlong gap during what should have been an enthusiastic beginning is especially curious. Some speculate that Lewis was taking field notes or keeping personal journals that he planned to transfer to official notebooks later and that his collection of unofficial inscriptions was then lost.
Letters from Lewis to Jefferson suggest that some kinds of journals were kept during the stay at Fort Mandan. Lewis, for example, mentioned a “correct” copy of a journal that he intended to send back to Washington prior to departing from Fort Mandan. Later he sent another letter to Jefferson promising a proper journal to be delivered by canoe to an outpost on the Missouri River. No journal was ever found. Several other sets of writings did materialize, however: lists of herb specimens, mineral deposits, geologic features, astronomical observations, a weather diary, and other notes. Some of these notes are attributed to other members of the party or are considered collaborative efforts between Lewis and Clark, who may have decided to stray from Jefferson’s explicit instructions that they both keep detailed and extensive records.
Others speculate that some of Lewis’s journals were lost at various points along the journey. One theory suggests that Lewis’s early writings were lost along with Clark’s during a sudden storm that rocked the vessel the corps was traveling in shortly after departing Fort Mandan. Clark’s notes were known to have been lost, but no mention is made of Lewis or his journals during the incident.
Other long gaps include time on the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers from September 19 to November 11, 1803; a stretch from November 28, 1803, until May 14, 1804; inconsistent entries from August 26, 1805, to January 1, 1806; and a long stretch from August 13, 1806, until the end of the journey. In total there were more than four hundred days of entries missing from Lewis’s journals between May 1804, and September 1806. Only the gap beginning on August 13, after Lewis was mysteriously shot in the thigh, has a plausible and evident explanation.
Though it is rarely mentioned in historical accounts of the journey, most scholars involved in collecting, editing, and publishing the journals of the Corps of Discovery conclude that tales of the journey are crafted from a convoluted patchwork of documents: field notes, field journals and notebooks, diary writings, scraps of paper, other various records, and a great deal of conjecture and supposition.
At least eight men were believed to have kept records: Lewis, Clark, privates Joseph Whitehouse and Robert Frazer, sergeants Patrick Glass, John Ordway, Charles Floyd, and Nathaniel Pryor. All but Ordway returned only partial records of the journey. Clark missed nine days in February 1805 while hunting for game. Gass’s original journal went missing before a controversial and paraphrased version of it was published in 1807. Though it is assumed he kept some kind of records, no evidence of any documents recorded by Pryor ever appeared. Floyd kept regular entries until his death on August 20, 1804. Private Whitehouse’s diary had several gaps and terminates without explanation on November 6, 1805. Ordway kept the most consistent records regarding the events of the day but didn’t keep extensive scientific records.
Curiously, Lewis’s diaries are not included among the works compiled to create the tale of Lewis and Clark’s great journey. During a time when the journals were being compiled and prepared for publishing, correspondence between Jefferson, Clark, and one of the first editors of the corps’ collective journals, Nicholas Biddle, mention no concern about Lewis’s missing diaries.
It is important to note that at this time that Biddle was not yet embroiled in efforts to revive America’s central banking system but was likely already in bed with the Rothschilds and the Federalists. Despite a preponderance of missing documents, stories of the corps began circulating in 1806 via newspapers, word of mouth, and government documents, including Jefferson’s first report to Congress of the journey. In 1808, with the help of schoolteacher David M’Keehan, the journals of Patrick Gass were published amid public and private protest by Lewis.
Biddle was the first to publish an authorized, official account of the journals kept by Lewis and Clark, albeit a paraphrased narrative and not an edited reprinting of the journals. Biddle was chosen by Clark and several advisors to tak
e on the task that Clark conceded he was not literate enough to complete. At the time Biddle was a young Philadelphia lawyer, editor, and publisher and was considered to be qualified to take on the massive project. At first Biddle refused the job offered to him by Clark but was later convinced by one of Lewis’s mentors, botanist Benjamin Smith Barton, to accept the assignment.
With the help of Clark, Biddle began work on the project in 1810, supplementing the collective, remaining journals of the corps with face-to-face interviews with Clark, who provided a wealth of additional material from memory during interviews conducted in Fincastle, Virginia. Biddle then returned to Philadelphia to complete the project.
In June 1811 Biddle finished the manuscript but delayed publishing the work because the chosen publishing house, Conrad, had recently gone bankrupt. Biddle shopped the manuscript around but eventually passed the project off to one of his cohorts at the Port Folio magazine, Paul Allen. At the time Biddle said he was overwhelmed by duties in the Pennsylvania state legislature, at Port Folio, and in his own law practice.
In 1814 the two-volume History Of The Expedition Under The Command Of Captains Lewis And Clark, To The Sources Of The Missouri, Thence Across The Rocky Mountains And Down The River Columbia To The Pacific Ocean. Performed During The Years 1804–5–6. By order of the Government Of The United States was published. Strangely, Biddle’s name did not appear on the book, which bore the byline “prepared for the press by Paul Allen, Esquire.” Scholars generally consider this edition the first published work to provide a reliable account of the travels of the Corps of Discovery and refer to it as the “Biddle/Allen edition.” It is generally accepted that Biddle took some literary liberties with the story, including a number of omissions regarding some of Lewis’s checkered history, such as his six court-martials while serving in the military, and a generalized effort to craft the narrative into a rousing frontier tale.
In April of 1818 Biddle claimed to have returned all the journals except Ordway’s to agents of the American Philosophical Society. Ordway’s journal was considered to have been rich with narrative about the daily exploits of the Corps, including strange details such as their encounters with legendary Welsh natives. Since then a number of journals and papers have appeared that indicate Biddle and others may have kept, lost, or miscataloged a number of the original journals given to them to edit.
In 1903 Reuben Gold Thwaites, editor of the centennial edition of the journals, received previously unknown Clark diaries and papers from Clark’s descendants. In 1915 Ordway’s journal and several of Lewis and Clark’s missing journals were found among some of Biddles old papers. In 1953 Clark’s field notes were discovered in a rolltop desk in Minnesota. Thwaites very clearly believed that many of the remaining missing documents, such as Lewis’s diaries, were lost shortly after his death in Tennessee.
In an essay that first appeared in Montana: The Magazine of Western History, Gary Moulton, editor of a later edition of the Lewis and Clark journals writes,
These discoveries seem to support the notion of other lost items yet to be found. No hope of discovery ranks so high as the hope of finding Meriwether Lewis’s diaries, which would fill the large gaps in his writing during and about the expedition. This essay looks at Lewis’s known journals, considers where gaps might be filled with the discovery of new materials, and concludes that there are few possibilities of new finds. To a large degree, these considerations are interpretative and speculative and the conclusions are tentative. We can only hope that more of Lewis’s writings are still to be found.7
The Murder of Meriwether Lewis
In June 2009, two centuries after his mysterious death, collateral descendants of Meriwether Lewis launched a website as part of a campaign to exhume and examine the explorer’s remains. The announced goal was simple: use modern forensic techniques to determine once and for all whether Lewis died by his own hand, or by someone else’s. Lewis’s family has worked for more than a decade to secure from the federal National Park Service permission for the exhumation and proper reburial. The campaign encourages concerned Americans to write letters to the secretary of the U.S. Department of the Interior, which oversees the National Park Service, which controls the land in Tennessee where Lewis is buried.
Lewis’s family began to bang loudly a drum that has been beating consistently since Lewis’s mysterious death at an inn along the historic Natchez Trace roadway. This renewed interest in Lewis’s true fate has caused substantial uproar among historians, government officials, academics, and armchair experts as they review a patchwork collection of documents, reports, and various pieces of evidence. All continue to draw a variety of conclusions based on that same evidence. Some say Lewis committed suicide, succumbing to a lifelong battle with depression, bipolar disorder, alcoholism, malaria, syphilis, or some combination thereof. Others are certain bandits murdered him, and yet others are equally certain that he was murdered as part of an assassination plot carried out by high-ranking officials of the burgeoning U.S. government. If one thing is clear, it is that Lewis’s death has come to represent a growing distrust of American history as presented and popularized.
Lewis was just thirty-two years old when he returned from the landmark exploration. The celebrations following the adventurers’ return masked the fact that Lewis had returned to an America rife with political turmoil. Upon returning, Lewis and Clark did not waste time in traveling east to debrief President Thomas Jefferson. The explorers were welcomed as heroes wherever they went and spent weeks touring, testifying, and receiving royal treatment. Following a string of celebrations and official inquiries Jefferson rewarded the explorers’ accomplishments with instant appointment to high political office.
As we know, Lewis was named governor of the tumultuous Upper Louisiana Territory. Clark was appointed brigadier general of the militia and superintendent of Indian Affairs for the same region, serving alongside Frederick Bates, who was named secretary of the Upper Louisiana Territory to serve under Lewis. Clark and Bates quickly left for St. Louis to begin their work. Lewis, in turn, left to wrap up some business in Philadelphia, where he intended to publish volumes and volumes of journals recorded by the Corps of Discovery during their journey. Lewis searched for a publisher and began looking for artists to illustrate the compiled works. The journals and field notes remained in St. Louis, waiting for Lewis to arrive and prepare them for publication.
Official records of Lewis’s life during the next four months are sparse. A letter from Lewis to old friend Mahlon Dickerson suggests that Lewis spent time celebrating and socializing during his stay in Philadelphia and that he may have sparked a romance and proposed marriage to a woman he met there. Lewis later returned to Virginia and made a round of official visits while hosted by President Jefferson at the White House. He also visited with his mother, Lucy Lewis Marks. Details of his time in Virginia end there. Some scholars speculate that he attended the treason trial of Aaron Burr in Richmond, Virginia, at Jefferson’s request.
On March 8, 1807—a full year after he was awarded the position— Lewis arrived in St. Louis to begin his appointed duties as governor of Upper Louisiana. His mysterious absence has never been satisfactorily explained. A letter from Jefferson sent during the interim suggests that he was frustrated and concerned about Lewis’s absence. The letter, dated July 17, 1807, reads, “Since I parted with you from Albemarle in Sep. last [1806] I have never had a line from you nor I believe has the Secretary of War with which you have much connection through the Indian department.” Expressing concern about publication of the expedition journals, he wrote, “We have no tidings yet of the forwardness of your printer. I hope the first part will not be delayed much longer.”1
Lewis is reported to have taken on his duties as governor with enthusiasm, but he struggled to manage the chaotic political circumstances he had inherited. Secretary Bates is characterized as having it in for Lewis, who he considered a political rival and perhaps usurper of his rightful role as governor of the Louisiana
Territory, and is said to have worked hard to undermine Lewis’s efforts as governor. Bates may also have harbored some resentment toward Lewis. Years earlier Bates had applied to become Jefferson’s private secretary, but Lewis was chosen in his stead.
Meanwhile references to his efforts in letters exchanged between Jefferson and other leaders suggest that Lewis developed a drinking problem. Other letters mark his occasional “melancholia,” which many observers suggest was a reference to clinical depression or late stage of syphilis. When James Madison became president in 1809 Jefferson’s cabinet was replaced, and Lewis’s great ally was no longer able to lend presidential support. Madison’s appointed secretary of war, William Eustis, complicated efforts in Louisiana by refusing to pay expense vouchers. Lewis is said to have paid government expenses from his own pocket, spiraling downward into severe financial trouble.
In the fall of 1809, Lewis made a special trip to Washington to settle his disputes with the War Department and to revive efforts to publish his journals. Lewis left St. Louis by boat on September 4, 1809, with plans to travel the Mississippi to New Orleans and then travel by sea to Washington, D.C. Reports from Fort Pickering commander Captain Gilbert Russell suggest that Lewis’s health and mental stability were deteriorating. After he arrived at Fort Pickering, near Memphis, Tennessee, Russell relayed that members of the boat crew reported that Lewis had twice attempted to kill himself. Russell was allegedly so alarmed at Lewis’s condition that he refused to let him leave until his health improved. During that time Lewis decided to travel to Washington by land. (Lewis said he changed his plans because he was afraid his expedition journals would fall into the hands of the British at sea.) His plan was to leave Fort Pickering for the Natchez Trace, a rough road that stretched 450 miles from Natchez, Mississippi, to Nashville, Tennessee. From there Lewis could take the road to Washington, D.C.