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John William Tuohy lives in Washington DC

Was Meriwether Lewis murdered?

  



Most of us have heard about the Lewis and Clark expedition. Meriwether Lewis was a close friend of President Thomas Jefferson, who had ordered the expedition. On September 3, 1809, Lewis set out for Washington, D.C. to resolve a number of issues regarding his denied payments of drafts he had drawn against the War Department while serving as governor of the Upper Louisiana Territory. If the payments were granted, he face bankruptcy. Lewis was not in good mental health at this point in his life. He was depressed and had written his will before his journey and also attempted suicide but was restrained.

Lewis stopped at an inn on the Natchez Trace, a very dangerous and lawless place, called Grinder's Stand. After dinner, he retired to his one-room cabin. In the innkeeper's wife, a lowly character named Priscilla Grinder, said she heard gunshots. Servants rushed to Lewis’s cabin and found Lewis badly injured from multiple gunshot wounds, one each to the head and gut. He died shortly after sunrise from loss of blood. Money that Lewis had borrowed from a friend, Major Gilbert Russell, at Fort Pickering to complete the journey was missing.

Historians generally agree that the account of the events attributed to Priscilla Grinder are fabricated.. Grinder claimed Lewis acted strangely the night before his death: standing and pacing during dinner and talking to himself in the way one would speak to a lawyer, with face flushed as if it had come on him in a fit. She continued to hear him talking to himself after he retired, and then at some point in the night, she heard multiple gunshots, a scuffle, and someone calling for help.

She claimed to be able to see Lewis through the slit in the door crawling back to his room. However, she never explained why she never investigated further at the time, but only the next morning sent her children to look for Lewis's servants.

She also claimed that three men followed Lewis up the Natchez Trace, and he pulled his pistols on them after they came to his cabin that night. Grinder said, in this account, that she heard voices and gunfire in Lewis's cabin about 1:00 am. She found the cabin empty and a large amount of gunpowder on the floor. Thus, in this account, Lewis's body was found outside the cabin.

Lewis's relatives and contended it was murder. (When William Clark and Thomas Jefferson were informed of Lewis's death, both accepted the conclusion of suicide) A coroner's jury held an inquest immediately after Lewis's death as provided by the local government but proved fruitless.

There are some factors that may support Lewis's suicide including big debts, heavy drinking, possible morphine and opium use, failure to prepare the expedition's journals for publication, repeated failure to find a wife, and the deterioration of his friendship with Thomas Jefferson.

Some 40 years later, in 1848, the Tennessee State Commission decided to erect a monument Lewis’s grave. Dr. Samuel B. Moore ordered Lewis's grave to be opened and reported that “it (The death) seems to be more probable that he died by the hands of an assassin."