First, thank you to those who wished me a happy anniversary last week! Husband Kevin and I had a very nice day at the Franklin Institute, which he and I have visited many times over the years. They were even so kind as to feature us on their Twitter page that day.
The weather was not entirely compatible with marker hunting, as it rained a lot; however, there are two markers right near the Franklin itself, and I was able to grab both of those before we returned home. This one, which was the first one I spotted, is about a man who opened the western frontier before meeting with a tragic end - and a mystery which has never been solved.
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| The marker stands in front of Drexel University's Academy of Natural Sciences, 1900 Benjamin Franklin Parkway, Philadelphia. |
I'm sure that the first thing some of you are wondering is what kind of a name is Meriwether? As it turns out, that was his mother's maiden name - in the 17th and 18th centuries, it was not at all unusual for a firstborn son to be given his mother's maiden name as his first name. That's a bit awkward to be typing over and over, though, so I'm going to call him Lewis.
Lewis was the third child and first son of William and Lucy (Meriwether) Lewis. He was born on August 18, 1774 on his family's plantation in Albemarle County, Virginia. His father died when he was just five years old; his mother remarried a Captain John Marks, and moved with him and her four children to Georgia. There, Lewis began honing his skills as an outdoorsman and pursuing his love of natural history. Among other things, he learned about herbalism and the use of local plants for medicines from his mother, who was a devotee of the subject.
This arrangement with France almost doubled the size of the United States, and gave the young country control of the extremely valuable Mississippi River and the port in New Orleans. However, most of the land in question was under the control of the Native American tribes. I'm not trying to gloss over the fact that what Jefferson did deprived these people of their rightful place; for the sake of brevity, I'm merely going to say that a lot of things happened over the next several years that were very unfair to the Natives. It's not the focus of this post, but I feel like I'd be remiss if I didn't acknowledge that.
In any case, Jefferson wanted to get a clear understanding of everything this new territory had to offer, particularly in terms of native plants, and he knew that his friend Lewis had a passion for botany. Lewis had also had some dealings with Native Americans during his youth in Georgia, and was sympathetic to them, so he seemed like a natural choice for negotiating with them. Lewis recruited his former commander, William Clark, and they formed a unit called the Corps of Discovery. They were accompanied in the Corps by several non-commissioned officers and civilian boatmen, a Canadian woodsman named George Drouillard, Clark's personal slave York, a dog called Seaman, and one married couple, the Charbonneaus.
Toussaint Charbonneau wasn't of particular interest to Lewis, but he and Clark were both great admirers of the man's Native American wife, Sacagawea. She was the teenage daughter of a Shoshone chief who had been kidnapped and sold into slavery, and then acquired by Charbonneau, who married her. She gave birth to their son Jean Baptiste during the course of the expedition, and carried him on her back for the remainder of the adventure. Sacagawea was deeply valuable to the Corps, both as an interpreter when they met with Native Americans and also as a symbol; having a woman with them served as a sort of proof that they came in peace. She later became the second woman in United States history to have her likeness engraved on a circulating coin.
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| Portrait of Meriwether Lewis by Charles Willson Peale, courtesy of Wiki Commons. |
Throughout 1805 and 1806, the Corps of Discovery crossed the Louisiana Territory and even went beyond into the disputed lands then known as the Oregon Country. They made it all the way to the Pacific Ocean before coming back. When they did return, Lewis brought hundreds of plant specimens and tons of notes about everything they encountered; he presented his findings and collections to Jefferson, who for whatever reason passed them on to the American Philosophical Society (more on that later). Lewis was then appointed governor of the Louisiana Territory, and he moved down to St. Louis, Missouri, to work on furthering the fur trade while also trying to protect the treaties which had been established with Native American tribes.
Lewis's success as governor was... well, not the greatest. He did accomplish quite a bit, including writing laws for the lawless region and helping to establish roads for traders and travelers; he also brokered peace between warring Native tribes and even helped to found the first Masonic Lodge in the territory. Unfortunately, the postal system being what it was, he wasn't able to keep Jefferson and other Washington bigwigs as well informed as they would have liked. Worse, Lewis was being undermined by Frederick Bates, his secretary, who wanted Lewis's job and kept accusing him of various misdeeds. These accusations led Congress to refuse to repay Lewis the money he had personally advanced for the expedition, which in turn led to his assets being seized by his creditors. His reputation was in tatters as a result.
In 1809, a desperate Lewis set off for Washington, D.C., hoping to defend himself against the various accusations and get Congress to help him clear his name. He was also looking to publish his journals from the expedition, which he carried with him. It's known that he originally planned to sail to Washington from New Orleans, but then changed his itinerary; it was rumored that the U.S. would again go to war with Great Britain (which we did a few years later), and he was afraid of his journals being seized or lost if his ship was attacked. So instead, he sailed from St. Louis to Natchez, Mississippi, then left the ship and followed the Natchez Trace toward Nashville. He stopped for the night at a place called Grinder's Stand, near what is today the community of Hohenwald, Tennessee, and this is where we encounter the unsolved mystery.
On the night of October 10th, Lewis ate his dinner, then went to sleep in the one-room cabin he had rented. His servants were sleeping in the stables. Sometime in the hours before dawn, the innkeeper's wife testified that she heard gunshots. Not long afterward, Lewis's servants found him badly injured, with severe gunshot wounds to the head, and he bled out and died around sunrise. To this day, no one knows exactly what happened - was it suicide or murder? Historians don't agree:
- Some think it was suicide, that he was driven to despair over the circumstances of the accusations and/or the fact that he was close to forty years old and had never married or had children. It's also been suggested that he may have had PTSD from the expedition. Supporting this theory is the fact that Lewis wrote out his will before departing St. Louis, and that his two closest friends, William Clark and Thomas Jefferson, readily accepted the idea that Lewis had indeed killed himself.
- Others believe it was murder. The Natchez Trace, which had been a pioneer road for many years, was notorious for being populated with robbers who often killed their victims, and it was reported at the time that there was money missing from Lewis's cabin. Alternately, one of Lewis's political opponents may have been behind it. Supporting that theory is an examination performed forty years after his death, in which the body was exhumed in preparation for the establishment of a tomb (today the Meriwether Lewis National Monument); the doctor who examined the remains was of the opinion that the wounds he suffered were more likely to have been delivered by someone else's hands. Also, Lewis's mother remained convinced for the rest of her life that her son was murdered by one of his own servants.
- A third, much smaller faction has suggested that the death was entirely accidental. Lewis may have been cleaning his weapon, or roused from sleep by noises that made him think he was in danger, and inadvertently shot himself in the darkness. How probable this is, I really don't know, but it's a much gentler idea than either of the other two possibilities.
Many of Lewis's relatives (descendants of his oldest sister Jane) have pleaded to exhume the body again and use modern forensics to answer the question once and for all. But because the grave is a historic site, permission must be given by the National Park Service, and they've refused on the grounds that it would disturb too many other graves nearby. So we'll never know for sure.
And that's why Meriwether Lewis - born in Virginia, governor in Louisiana, died in Tennessee - has a historical marker in Pennsylvania. Though he came to a terrible and tragic end, his work lives forever, right here.
Sources and Further Reading:
Ambrose, Stephen. Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West. Simon & Schuster, 1996.
Esterel, Mike. "Meriwether Lewis's Final Journey Remains a Mystery." The Wall Street Journal, September 25, 2010.
The Meriwether Lewis National Monument
Meriwether Lewis at the Encyclopaedia Britannica
Lewis and Clark's Herbarium at the Academy of Natural Sciences at Drexel University
Meriwether Lewis at FindAGrave.com
Meriwether Lewis at the Historical Marker Database
Except where indicated, all writing and photography on this blog is the intellectual property of Laura Klotz. This blog is written with permission of the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission. I am not employed by the PHMC. All rights reserved.
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