by Paul Schrag
While Lewis continued his compulsory recovery at Fort Pickering, Major James Neelly, agent to the Chickasaw Nation and a close ally of Wilkinson, arrived and agreed to travel with Lewis. By then Lewis’s health was reported to have improved enough for him to travel. Lewis left Fort Pickering with Neelly and two servants. One of them, John Pernier, was Lewis’s personal servant. The other, an unnamed black man, was Neelly’s travel companion.
Shortly after an optimistic departure Neelly reported that Lewis’s health had begun to deteriorate. The party rested at the Chickasaw Indian agency and then continued on toward Nashville on the morning of October 10. Neelly stayed behind to look for some horses that had strayed while Lewis and the others went on ahead. That evening, Lewis’s party arrived at Grinder’s Stand, a roadside inn about seventy miles southeast of Nashville. Lewis and his travel companions checked in with the intention of waiting for Neelly.
Early the next morning, on October 11, Meriwether Lewis died in his room from two gunshot wounds and what appeared to be a series of knife wounds.
Immediate details of the discovery of Lewis’s body and the circumstances surrounding his death are largely contained in a single letter from Neelly. His letter to Thomas Jefferson, and subsequent letters sent by friends and associates of Lewis, all seem to have been based on the accounts of Mrs. Grinder, at whose house Lewis stayed. Those accounts, due to the pace of communication, situational complications, and the remoteness of the site of Lewis’s demise, were collected and delivered to government officials, including Jefferson, during a period of several years.
The first and most immediate report came from Neelly who, appointed to his position as agent to the Chickasaw Nation by Wilkinson, was suspiciously absent during Lewis’s deadly ordeal and was not an eyewitness.
Three months after Lewis’s death and Neely’s report, Fort Pickering Captain Gilbert Russell, another Wilkinson appointee, wrote two letters to former president Thomas Jefferson, providing further details of Lewis’s death. Russell’s descriptions of Lewis’s health when he arrived at Fort Pickering, along with other descriptions of the explorer’s overall health, became the foundation for assertions that Lewis committed suicide.
In the first letter, dated January 4, 1810, Russell described Lewis’s condition when he arrived at the fort, noting that he had detained Lewis for his own protection.
The second letter, dated January 31, 1810, contained more details and suggests that Lewis was struggling with a severe drinking problem that seemed to subside during Lewis’s compulsory stay at Fort Pickering. Russell then accused Neelly of encouraging Lewis to drink again after they left the fort. “Instead of preventing the Govr from drinking or putting him under restraint advised him to it,” Russell wrote, “and from everything I can learn gave the man every chance to seek an opportunity to destroy himself. And from the statement of Grinder’s wife where he killed himself I can not help believing that Purney [John Pernier, Lewis’s servant] was rather aiding and abetting in the murder than otherwise.”2
Author and historian Eldon G. Chuinard, who calls Lewis his hero, calls into question the allegation that Lewis was deranged at the time, inferring that Russell had concocted the story. He notes a letter written by Lewis on September 22, 1809—just two weeks before his death— to Amos Stoddard, commandant of Upper Louisiana. The letter, says Chuinard, appears to be written by a very lucid Lewis.
The entire letter is a lucid, coherent statement written when he was supposed to have mental derangement while coming down the Mississippi and during his first days at Fort Pickering. . . . Also in the letter he says, “You will direct me at the City of Washington until the last of December, after which I expect I shall be on my return to St. Louis.” This does not sound like a “mentally depressed” person. A return to his duties in St. Louis was clearly on his mind— not suicide.3
Historical investigator Kira Gale goes even further to discredit Russell’s reports, speculating that they were forgeries produced by Wilkinson. The assertion that Russell’s letters were forged was confirmed by handwriting experts during a coroner’s inquest conducted in 1996. Gale suggests that these were the very letters that convinced both William Clark and Thomas Jefferson that their friend had committed suicide.
After his friend’s death, Clark received letters citing suicide attempts by Lewis while he was en route to Fort Pickering and 15 days of mental derangement while he was at the fort. It was enough to convince him at the time. But most likely, these letters were forgeries created by General Wilkinson to mislead Clark. Clark thought the letters were written by Captain Gilbert Russell, the commander of Fort Pickering (today’s Memphis, Tennessee), where Lewis spent two weeks in September.
Lewis died under mysterious circumstances on the Natchez Trace on October 11, 1809 after leaving Fort Pickering. Clark wrote to his brother Jonathan Clark on November 26, 1809 with news of Lewis’s suicide attempts and mental derangement—information contained in the letters Clark had received, supposedly written by Captain Russell. These letters from Russell have never been found, so the handwriting cannot be analyzed. However, we have two authentic letters written by Captain Russell to President Thomas Jefferson in January, 1810. These letters to the President provided a wealth of detail, but they contain no report of prior suicide attempts while en route to the fort, no report of 15 days in a state of mental derangement while Lewis was at the fort, and no report of a second will written at the fort. All things Captain Russell would surely have reported to the President if they were true.4
Further details of Lewis’s demise appeared in a letter from Alexander Wilson to a mutual friend. Wilson was a well-known ornithologist and friend of Lewis and had agreed to complete the bird illustrations for Lewis’s published journals. Two years after Lewis’s body was discovered, while traveling the Natchez Trace, Wilson interviewed Mrs. Grinder. He recounted the conversation in a letter to Alexander Lawson.
Dated May 28, 1811, it reads:
Next morning (Sunday) I rode six miles to a man’s of the name of Grinder, where our poor friend Lewis perished. In the same room where he expired, I took down from Mrs. Grinder the particulars of that melancholy event, which affected me extremely. This house or cabin is seventy-two miles from Nashville, and is the last white man’s as you enter the Indian country. Governor Lewis, she said, came there about sun-set, alone, and inquired if he could stay for the night; and, alighting, brought his saddle into the house. He was dressed in a loose gown, white, striped with blue. On being asked if he came alone, he replied that there were two servants behind, who would soon be up. He called for some spirits, and drank a very little. When the servants arrived, one of whom was a negro, he inquired for his powder, saying he was sure he had some powder in a canister. The servant gave no distinct reply, and Lewis, in the mean while walked backwards and forwards before the door, talking to himself. Sometimes, she said, he would seem as if he were walking up to her; and would suddenly wheel round, and walk back as fast as he could. Supper being ready he sat down, but had not eat but a few mouthfuls when he started up speaking to himself in a violent manner. At these times, she says, she observed his face to flush as if it had come on him in a fit. He lighted his pipe, and drawing a chair to the door sat down, saying to Mrs. Grinder in a kind tone of voice, “Madam this is a very pleasant evening.” He smoked for some time, but quitted his seat and traversed the yard as before. He again sat down to his pipe, seemed again composed and casting his eyes wishfully towards the west, observed what a sweet evening it was. Mrs. Grinder was preparing a bed for him; but he said he would sleep on the floor, and desired the servant to bring the bear skins and buffaloe robe, which were immediately spread out for him; and it being now dusk the woman went off to the kitchen, and the two men to the barn, which stands about two hundred yards off. The kitchen is only a few paces from the room where Lewis was, and the woman being considerably alarmed by the behavior of her guest could not sleep but listened to him walking backwards and forwards, she thinks for several ho
urs, and talking aloud, as she said, “like a lawyer,” She then heard the report of a pistol, and something fall heavily on the floor, and the words “O Lord.” Immediately afterwards she heard another pistol, and in a few minutes she hear him at her door calling out “O madam! Give me some water, and heal my wounds.” The logs being open, and unplastered, she saw him stagger back and fall against a stump that stands between the kitchen and room. He crawled for some distance, raised himself by the side of a tree, where he sat about a minute. He once more got to the room; afterwards he came to the kitchen door, but did not speak; she then heard him scraping the bucket with a gourd for water, but it appears that this cooling element was denied the dying man! As soon as day broke and not before, the terror of the woman having permitted him to remain for two hours in this most deplorable situation, she sent two of her children to the barn, her husband not being at home, to bring the servants; and on going in they found him lying on the bed; he uncovered his side and shewed them where the bullet had entered; a piece of the forehead was blown off, and had exposed the brains, without having bled much. He begged they would take his rifle and blowout his brains, and he would give them all the money he had in his trunk. He often said, “I am no coward, but I am so strong, so hard to die.” He begg’d the servant [John Pernier] not to be afraid of him, for that he would not hurt him. He expired in about two hours, or just as the sun rose above the trees. He lies buried close by the common path, with a few loose rails thrown over his grave. I gave Grinder money to put a post fence round it, to shelter it from the hogs, and from the wolves; and he gave me his written promise he would do it. I left this place in a very melancholy mood, which was not much allayed by the prospect of the gloomy and savage wilderness which I was just entering alone.5
Biographer and editor of one of the earliest accounts of Lewis’s adventures, Dr. Elliot Coues describes the account given by Wilson of Lewis’s death as the one likely to be most accurate. He explains that because of Wilson’s scientific training and experience as a researcher, the accuracy of his account should be considered highly, despite the amount of time that lapsed between Lewis’s death and the report. What he doubts, however, is the story provided by Mrs. Grinder, which he characterizes as preposterous at best. He also questions strongly the final memoir written by Jefferson. In fact, Coues was so certain that the claim of suicide was bogus, he wrote his own supplement to Jefferson’s memoir of Lewis:
. . . Jefferson’s Memoire of Lewis is a noble and fitting tribute, leaving little to be desired as a contemporaneous biography. It has been accepted as authoritative and final, and has furnished the basis of every memoir of Lewis I have seen. . . . What else I have to say concerns not Lewis’ life, but the circumstances of his death; and certain subsequent events. . . . The affirmation of suicide, though made without qualification, has not passed unchallenged into history. . . . Undoubtedly Jefferson wrote in the light of all evidence that had reached him in 1813; but it appears that his view of the case was far from that of persons who lived in the vicinity of the scene at the time.
There is no more room to doubt Wilson’s painstaking correctness than there is reason for doubting his veracity. But the narrative of Mrs. Grinder is very extraordinary. A woman who could do as she said she did, after hearing and seeing what she testifies, must be judged “fit for treason, stratagem, and spoils,” and not to be believed under oath. The story is wildly improbable on its face; it does not hang together; there is every sign it is a concoction on the part of an accomplice in crime, either before or after the event. On the theory that Mrs. Grinder was privy to a plot to murder Governor Lewis, and therefore had her own part to play in the tragedy, even if that part were a passive one—or on the theory that, becoming afterward cognizant of the murder, she told a story to shield the actual criminal or criminals—on either of these theories we could understand Mrs. Grinder; otherwise her story is simply incredible. Yet it is upon such evidence as this that the imputation of suicide rests.6
As Coues points out, the details of Mrs. Grinder’s story are hard to believe. Lewis did indeed seem to have been worried and agitated about something. But why would a woman, who managed a stop along a notoriously dangerous stretch of road, have been unable to sleep over such a thing? Why, upon hearing pistol shots, a thud, and cries for help, would she simply peer through the cracks of her kitchen wall to investigate? When she saw Lewis crawling, falling, struggling, why didn’t she aid him? Why wait two hours after shots were fired to raise an alarm? Why send a pair of children to ask servants, who had heard nothing, to investigate? Why did they do nothing as Lewis begged and bribed, for two hours, for them to put him out of his misery? Moreover, as noted by Chuinard, the story told by Grinder does not constitute a reasonable medical probability, no matter how strong Lewis’s constitution was.
Despite the implausibility of the reported circumstances, and the knowledge that the first reports came from Neelly and Russell—both allies of Lewis’s sworn enemy Wilkinson—it appears that those were the very details upon which Lewis’s three closest friends, Thomas Jefferson, William Clark, and Mahlon Dickerson, accepted the notion that he had committed suicide.
In a letter to his brother Jonathan, William Clark wrote, “I fear O! I fear the weight of his mind has overcome him.”
Dickerson mourned Lewis’s death in his diary and did not question the explanation of suicide.
While he lived with me in Washington, I observed at times sensible depressions of mind. . . . During his western expedition the constant exertion which that required of all the faculties of body & mind, suspended these distressing affections; but after his establishment in St. Louis in sedentary occupations they returned upon him with redoubled vigor, and began seriously to alarm his friends. He was in a paroxym of one of these when his affairs rendered it necessary for him to go to Washington.7
From those few statements and conclusions derive countless books, official reports, biographies, and dissertations that conclude unquestioningly and uncritically that Lewis, an expert marksman and road-hardened explorer, had sloppily committed suicide by shooting himself in the back of the head and chest, and then cutting himself from head to toe with razors. All was done presumably to protect him from enemies that Gilbert and others assert were figments of Lewis’s deranged imagination. Lewis was buried hastily along with details of his death and the definitive truth of his killer.
In 1848, nearly forty years after Lewis’s demise, the state of Tennessee began an effort to erect a monument at his gravesite. His remains were located, verified, and then reburied. A monument was erected at the site to honor Lewis and his contributions. The monument was made of rough-cut stone at the base, topped with a 12-foot column of Tennessee marble, deliberately broken at the top. The committee report states, “The design is simple, but it is intended to express the difficulties, successes and violent termination of a life which was marked by bold enterprise, by manly courage and devoted patriotism.”
What’s far more intriguing, however, is the unsolicited questioning of reports about Lewis’s death contained in a “Report of the Lewis Monumental Committee,” presented to the legislature of 1849–50. It reads, “The impression has long prevailed that under the influence of disease of body and mind—of hopes based upon long and valuable services—not merely deferred, but wholly disappointed—Governor Lewis perished by his own hands,” the report reads. “It seems to be more probable that he died by the hands of an assassin.”8
Tennessee lawyer James D. Park devoted a great deal of time to investigating the cold case of the death of Lewis and delivered his finding in a September 1891 issue of the Nashville American, echoing the sentiment expressed in the report by the Lewis Monumental Committee. Park claimed, in what amounted to a legal brief arguing that Lewis was murdered, that no one in the vicinity of Lewis’s murder was ever convinced that Lewis committed suicide. He wrote, “It has always been the firm belief of the people of this region that Governor Lewis was murdered and robbed. The oldest citizens
now living remember the rumor current at the time as to the murder, and it seems no thought of suicide ever obtained footing here.”9
Based on interviews with people who were employed at Grinder’s Stand, Park surmised that Lewis had been murdered and robbed by Mr. Grinder. Reports from the region indicated that Grinder had even stood trial for the murder but was acquitted for lack of evidence.
Park, like Coues and others, suggests that Lewis’s character, health, and overall mental state at the time of his death stand in contradiction to claims that he committed suicide. Park writes:
It seems incredible that a young man of 35, the governor of the vast territory of Louisiana, then on his way from the capital to that of his nation, where he knew he would be received with all the distinction and consideration due to his office and reputation, should take his own life. His whole character is a denial of the theory. He was too brave and conscientious in the discharge of every public duty, public and private; too conspicuous a person in the eyes of the country, and crowned with too many laurels, to cowardly sneak out of the world by the back way, a self-murderer. This idea was doubtless invented to cover up the double crime of robbery and murder, and seems to have been the only version of his death that reached Mr. Jefferson and his other friends in Virginia.10
The question then remains, who killed Lewis?
One of the most popular and widely accepted murder theories suggests that bandits murdered Lewis during a robbery. The Natchez Trace was a long and treacherous stretch of road through dark woodland, and there were plenty of murders and robberies reported along the trail. But bandits are not the only suspected culprits. Nearly everyone close to Lewis on that fateful night has been listed among potential murder suspects, including Mr. and Mrs. Grinder, Lewis’s servant, John Pernier, Major Neelly, a local renegade named Runion, and several native chiefs who reportedly had been traveling with Lewis and Neelly.