Just received an email today from my local chapter of the Lewis & Clark Trail Heritage Foundation, an organization to which I am a member. Upon the bicentennial of his untimely and mysteriously death, Captain Meriwether Lewis finally gets a proper military funeral.
The upcoming newspaper story:
A melancholy outcome
October commemoration recalls the death of Meriwether Lewis
By Tom Dillon
HOHENWALD, Tenn. -- Between 2004 and 2006, the United States celebrated the bicentennial of the Lewis and Clark Expedition. It was a look back at the first crossing of the continent by citizens of the United States, and it was a commemoration of the opening of the West, for better or worse. Millions of people followed the trail of explorers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark and their Corps of Discovery. It was an eventful three years even for the Indian tribes, many of whom participated with rather mixed feelings. It's easy to depict the expedition as an American triumph.
Now, however, comes the denouement. October 11, 2009, is the bicentennial of the apparent suicide of Meriwether Lewis, leader of the expedition. That's the day he took his life, about 3 a.m. at a lonely inn along the Natchez Trace in Tennessee, southwest of Nashville.
That's what most history books say, at least, and neither Clark nor President Thomas Jefferson saw reason to suspect anything else. Jefferson wrote three years later, in a short biography of Lewis, that Lewis had from early life "been subject to hypocondriac affections" -- his version of what we would today call clinical depression. The disease ran in Lewis's family, and it apparently ravaged his life after the expedition was over.
Others differed, saying Lewis was murdered, and the argument still goes on today. Even the chairman of a Meriwether Lewis commemoration, set for Oct. 3-7 in Mississippi and Tennessee, thinks the explorer was probably murdered. “The facts just don't add up,” said Tony L. Turnbow, a Franklin, Tenn., lawyer who has followed the story of Lewis and Clark for years. Some even support exhuming the body for a forensic examination.
But more important, says Turnbow, is that Lewis, despite his inestimable service to the country, never had a proper funeral service. He was buried along the Natchez Trace – then a woods path from Natchez to Nashville, today a scenic highway similar to the Blue Ridge Parkway – and for years his grave wasn't even marked. Today there is a monument at a small park along the trace, as well as a reconstruction of the small inn, known as Grinder's Stand, where Lewis died. But there was no real service.
So that, along with a recounting of Lewis' life, is what Turnbow and the Lewis and Clark Trail Heritage Foundation are planning. The foundation, which has headquarters in Great Falls, Montana, is the primary organization overseeing this last event of the Lewis and Clark bicentennial.
It will be a melacholy event, Turnbow admitted. There will be a re-enactment of Lewis' arrival at the inn, and even two gunshots – those two shots are one of the things that bother Turnbow, for the record – at some point. But the event, titled “Courage Undaunted – The Final Journey,” is a necessary commemoration, he said. Lewis and Clark followers from all over the country are expected to show up for it and for a four-day symposium dealing with the aftermath of the Lewis and Clark expedition.
The symposium is scheduled for the Whispering Woods Conference Center in Olive Branch, Miss., Oct. 3-6, while the commemoration will take place Oct. 7 at the Meriwether Lewis park and Grinder's Stand reconstruction up the Natchez Trace Parkway near Hohenwald, Tenn. One of the speakers will be Peyton C. Clark, a descendant of William Clark, and descendants of the Lewis family will preside over a wreath-laying. The 101st Airborne Infantry Band will perform.
The Meriwether Lewis site itself is a peaceful place some 40 miles north of the Alabama-Tennessee state line. It's at milepost 385.9 on the Natchez Trace Parkway (meaning it's that far from Natchez). The northern terminus is at milepost 442.3 outside Nashville. The land is rolling hills and wooded, an oak-hickory forest, with several sections of the actual trace available for hiking. In many places, you'll find the old route a deep depression in the topography, testifying to the Indian, French, Spanish and American traffic on it through its lifetime. Further south, there's Spanish moss around.Lewis' monument is in the form of a broken shaft, signifying a life cut off at mid-point. It was originally erected in 1848 with the base reconstructed in the year 2000. The inscription reads, in part, “His melancholy death occurred where this monument now stands and under which rest his mortal remains.”
Nearby are a picnic area and campground, a ranger station and the Grinder's Stand reconstruction – through Turnbow took pains to point out that the cabin is not an exact replica. No one today really knows what the old cabin looked like, he said. Today's building was built by the Works Progress Administration in 1935 as a “representative cabin.” There are plans for new visitor's center on the site, but no building schedule. And perhaps that's fitting, because the whole place leaves one with a sense of something left hanging. That was the situation almost from the start.
To begin with, Lewis' death left the Louisiana territory without a governor – he'd been assigned to the job not long after returning from the west. More important was that Lewis died without rewriting his journals for publication. His death meant a long delay in their release to the public -- neither Clark nor Jefferson wanted to undertake the massive editing that would be required. The journals were not published until 1814, near the end of the War of 1812. They sold slowly, and for those reasons, it was many years before Lewis and Clark were properly credited for their accomplishments. In some respects, one can say their accomplishments are only now becoming fully appreciated.
Jefferson, however, never soured on Lewis despite what happened, saying that the country had been deprived "of one of her most valued citizens." In a 1813 letter, the now-former president wrote that Lewis possessed “a firmness and perseverance of purpose which nothing but impossibilities could divert from its direction. ... I could have no hesitation in confiding the enterprise to him.”
And those are the ideas that Turnbow and his associates want to get across. “What we want to accomplish is to help people understand Lewis as a real human being,” he said, not a plaster model. “We hope this will be something that people will always remember.”
Information about “Courage Undaunted – The Final Journey,” is available from the Lewis & Clark Trail Heritage Foundation at P.O. Box 3434, Great Falls, Mont. 59403. Or call (888) 701-3434, or visit the website at lewisandclark.org.
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