Night Falls Fast Read online

  Thursday May 2nd, 1805.

  The wind continued violent all night nor did it abate much of it’s violence this morning, when at daylight it was attended with snow which continued to fall untill about 10 A.M. being about one inch deep, it formed a singular contrast with the vegitation which was considerably advanced. some flowers had put forth in the plains, and the leaves of the cottonwood were as large as a dollar. sent out some hunters who killed 2 deer 3 Elk and several buffaloe; on our way this evening we also shot three beaver along the shore; these anamals in consequence of not being hunted are extreemly gentle, where they are hunted they never leave their lodges in the day, the flesh of the beaver is esteemed a delecacy among us; I think the tale a most delicious morsal, when boiled it resembles in flavor the fresh tongues and sounds of the codfish, and is usually sufficiently large to afford a plentifull meal for two men.

  Friday, May 3rd, 1805

  We saw vast quantities of Buffaloe, Elk, deer principally of the long tale kind, Antelope or goats, beaver, geese, ducks, brant and some swan. near the entrance of the river mentioned in the 10th. course of this day, we saw an unusual number of Porcupines from which we determined to call the river after that anamal, and accordingly denominated it Porcupine river. …

  I walked out a little distance and met with 2 porcupines which were feeding on the young willow which grow in great abundance on all the sandbars; this anamal is exceedingly clumsy and not very watchfull I approached so near one of them before it percieved me that I touched it with my espontoon.—found the nest of a wild goose among some driftwood in the river from which we took three eggs. this is the only nest we have met with on driftwood, the usual position is the top of a broken tree, sometimes in the forks of a large tree but almost invariably, from 15 to 20 feet or upwards high.—

  Neither Lewis nor Clark was a professional naturalist or geographer, but they were fastidious in their measurements and descriptions of the places they had been and the wildlife they had seen. Along the way, they sent back to Jefferson and scientists in Philadelphia the moon rocks of their time: nearly two hundred different specimens of trees and plants—grasses from the plains, currants, wildflowers, sagebrush, flax, Mariposa lilies, spruce, and maples—most of which had been, until that time, unknown to leading botanists. They shipped crates full of roots, seeds, and bulbs, as well as the skins and skeletons of weasels, coyotes, squirrels, badgers, birds, antelopes, mountain rams, and scores of other animals. “Few explorers have undertaken a larger task or achieved greater success in carrying it out,” observed one writer. “Their survey notes were meticulously recorded, and their maps of the areas explored were the best available for fifty years.”

  In September 1806 the Corps of Discovery completed its journey. Jefferson’s initial hope of finding a Northwest Passage that linked the Atlantic with the Pacific was not realized, but the exploration was otherwise a success beyond the imaginations of imaginative men. When Lewis and Clark and the rest of their expedition arrived in St. Louis, they stepped from their boat into a swirl of acclaim, society balls, and national celebration. “Never,” declared Thomas Jefferson, “did a similar event excite more joy in the United States.” Meriwether Lewis, however, only thirty-two years old, began the descent into the last three, deeply unsettled years of his life.

  It is nearly two hundred years since Meriwether Lewis died of gunshot wounds in a cabin seventy miles from Nashville. The circumstances of his death remain charged with controversy and rancor, although suicide seems by far to be the most likely explanation for his death. But suicide is at odds with a country’s notion of what a hero should be. Thomas Jefferson, who for two years had lived intimately with Lewis and who had treated him like a son; William Clark, who had shared leadership, adversity, and triumphs with him for at least as long; and those who were with Lewis during the last hours and days of his life had no doubt that his wounds were self-inflicted. Yet the possibility that Lewis might have killed himself proved unthinkable to many who had never even met him. Derangement, as several who observed his mental state toward the end of his life described it, seemed, for some, inconsistent with courage, honor, and accomplishment of the first rank. Conspiracy theories and speculation about murder cropped up to “protect” the blackened reputation of the explorer. But what was the evidence of suicide? Who could imagine that Lewis’s reputation needed defending? And why should suicide be seen as a dishonorable rather than just dreadfully tragic act?

  Contemporary accounts of the weeks leading up to Lewis’s death make a compelling case for a deeply distraught and troubled man who was drinking heavily, spending and investing money irrationally, and acting in a way that caused others to be concerned for his safety and well-being. His position as governor of the Louisiana Territories, taken up after his return from the West, was marred by conflict and questionable judgment, and he was hopelessly behind in preparing the journals of the expedition. Jefferson was clearly exasperated: “I am very often applied to know when our work will appear,” he wrote to Lewis. “I have so long promised copies to my literary correspondents in France that I am almost bankrupt in their eyes. I shall be very happy to receive from yourself information of your expectations on this subject.” The inordinate delay in forwarding the highly awaited information about the journey was not the first time there had been gaps in Lewis’s writing. Most of them, interestingly, showed a similar seasonal pattern, occurring during August and/or September; some extended through late fall or early winter, as well (Lewis died in early October 1809). In that same time of the year, in August 1805, Lewis also wrote the only introspective and rather melancholic entry into his journal:

  This day I completed my thirty first year, and conceived that I had in all human probability now existed about half the period which I am to remain in this Sublunary world. I reflected that I had as yet done but little, very little indeed, to further the hapiness of the human race, or to advance the information of the succeeding generation. I viewed with regret the many hours I have spent in indolence, and now soarly feel the want of that information which those hours would have given me had they been judiciously expended. but since they are past and cannot be recalled, I dash from me the gloomy thought, and resolved in future, to redouble my exertions and at least indeavour to promote those two primary objects of human existence, by giving them the aid of that portion of talents which nature and fortune have bestoed on me; or in future, to live for mankind, as I have heretofore lived for myself.

  In early September 1809, the month before he died, Lewis set off for Washington and Philadelphia to straighten out his financial affairs and to work on the publication of his expedition journals. William Clark, who had tried to help Lewis sort out his expense accounts, was clearly concerned about the state of Lewis’s mind: “Several of his Bills [to the government] have been protested, and his Crediters all flocking in near the time of his Setting out distressed him much, which he expressed to me in Such terms as to Cause a Cempothy which is not yet off—I do not believe there was ever a honester man in Louisiana nor one who had pureor motives than Govr. Lewis. if his mind had been at ease I Should have parted Cherefuly.”

  A week after leaving St. Louis, Lewis drew up a will, and a few days later he arrived at Fort Pickering (Memphis). The commanding officer of the fort, Captain Gilbert Russell, heard from the crew on Lewis’s boat that Lewis had twice attempted to kill himself. Russell himself observed that Lewis had been drinking heavily and was, at the time he arrived at the fort, “mentally deranged.” The commander, afraid that Lewis would take his own life, unloaded Lewis’s boat so that he could not escape and kept him under constant surveillance for several days:

  In this condition he continued without any material change for about five days, during which time the most proper and efficatious means that could be devised to restore him was administered, and on the sixth or seventh day all symptoms of derangement disappeared and he was completely in his senses and thus continued for ten or twelve days.… In three or four days he
was again affected with the same mental disease. He had no person with him who could manage or controul him in his propensities and he daily grew worse untill he arrived at the house of a Mr. Grinder … where in the apprehension of being destroyed by enemies which had no existence but in his wild imagination, he destroyed himself in the most cool desperate and Barbarian-like manner, having been left in the house intirely to himself.

  The U.S. agent to the Chickasaw Nation, James Neelly, who was with Lewis for the last three weeks of his life, wrote to President Jefferson shortly after Lewis’s death: “It is with extreme pain I have to inform you of the death of His Excellency Meriwether Lewis, Governor of Upper Louisiana who died on the morning of the 11th instant and I am Sorry to Say by Suicide.” He reported, as Russell had, that Lewis had been mentally “deranged” off and on for some period of time.

  The details of Lewis’s suicide were later recorded in detail by his friend, the eminent ornithologist Alexander Wilson. He wrote his account after interviewing the woman at whose inn Lewis had died:

  Governor Lewis, she said, came hither about sunset, 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 … he inquired for his powder.… [He] 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 eaten only a few mouthfuls when he started up, speaking to himself in a violent manner.… 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 wistfully 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 buffalo robe, which were immediately spread out for him; and, it now being 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 hours, and talking aloud, as she said, “like a lawyer.” She then heard the report of a pistol, and something fall heavily to the floor, and the words “O Lord!” Immediately afterwards she heard another pistol, and in a few minutes she heard 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 the room. He crawled for some distance, and 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 in the bucket with a gourd for water; but it appears that this cooling element was denied the dying man.

  As soon as the 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 home, to bring the servants; and on going in they found him lying on the bed. He uncovered his side, and showed them where the bullet had entered; a piece of his forehead was blown off, and had exposed the brains, without having bled much.

  He begged they would take his rifle and blow out his brains, and he would give them all the money in his trunk. He often said, “I am no coward; but I am so strong, so hard to die.” He begged the servant 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.

  Captain Russell’s account of Lewis’s last hours was even more dreadful. After twice shooting himself with his pistol, Russell reports, Lewis “got his razors from a port folio which happened to contain them and siting up in his bed was found about day light, by one of the servants, busily engaged in cuting himself from head to foot.”

  William Clark was stricken at the news of his friend’s death, but he was not entirely surprised by the accounts that Lewis had killed himself: “I fear O! I fear the weight of his mind has overcome him,” he wrote to his brother two weeks after Lewis died. And Thomas Jefferson, in a short memoir about Meriwether Lewis, wrote:

  Governor Lewis had, from early life, been subject to hypochondriac [depressive] affections. It was a constitutional disposition in all the nearer branches of the family of his name, and was more immediately inherited by him from his father. They had not, however, been so strong as to give uneasiness to his family. While he lived with me in Washington I observed at times sensible depressions of mind: but knowing their constitutional source, I estimated their course by what I had seen in the family. During his western expedition, the constant exertion which that required of all the faculties of body and mind, suspended these distressing affections; but after his establishment at St. Louis in sedentary occupations, they returned upon him with redoubled vigour, and began seriously to alarm his friends. He was in a paroxysm of one of these, when his affairs rendered it necessary for him to go to Washington.…

  About three o’clock in the night he did the deed which plunged his friends into affliction, and deprived his country of one of her most valued citizens.… It lost too to the nation the benefit of receiving from his own hand the narrative … of his sufferings and successes, in endeavoring to extend for them the boundaries of science, and to present to their knowledge that vast and fertile country, which their sons are destined to fill with arts, with science, with freedom and happiness.

  Jefferson’s account of his friend’s death would seem to many, myself included, a thoughtful and compassionate portrayal of the death of a courageous man. But others have felt differently. Some simply cannot reconcile the outward realities of Lewis’s life with his desire to leave it. Olin Dunbar Wheeler, historian and editor, was one of these. “It seems impossible,” he wrote, “that a young man of 35, the Governor of the vast Territory of Louisiana, then on his way from his capital to that of the nation, where he knew he would be received with all the distinction and consideration due his office and reputation, should take his own life.” Biographer Flora Seymour, writing in 1937, thought suicide totally out of character: “Many believed that Governor Lewis, ill, dejected, despairing of justice, had died by his own hand.… But those who had been with the brave young captain on the long journey West felt that this could not be the solution. The Meriwether Lewis they knew did not lose his courage nor his head in times of trial.”

  A more recent biographer, Richard Dillon, takes Seymour’s argument further, determined to clear Lewis’s name of the “crime” of suicide:

  Is it likely that the cause of Lewis’s death was self-murder? Not at all. If there is such a person as the antisuicide type, it was Meriwether Lewis. By temperament, he was a fighter, not a quitter.… Sensitive he was; neurotic he was not. Lewis was one of the most positive personalities in American history.

  Not enough has been made of the factors weighing against his taking his own life. His courage; his enthusiasm; his youth (thirty-five); his plans—to return to St. Louis, after seeing his mother and setting things straight in Washington; to engage in the fur trade with his brother, Reuben, and his best friend, Will Clark.…

  In a democracy such as ours—to which Meriwether Lewis was so strongly dedicated—it is held in the courts of justice that a man is presumed innocent of a crime until proved guilty. Meriwether Lewis has not been proven guilty of self-destruction at Grinder’s Stand in the early hours of October 11, 1809. Therefore let him be found NOT GUILTY of the charge—the crime of suicide.

  Yet others have stated that Lewis’s death was somehow “beclouded” or “tainted by dishonor”; some,
believing that Lewis was murdered, have impugned Jefferson’s integrity for concluding that Lewis’s death was self-inflicted: “It seems to me that Jefferson’s ready acceptance of Lewis’s death by suicide was a disgraceful way to treat a man,” wrote physician and historian E. G. Chuinard a few years ago. David Leon Chandler, a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist, put Jefferson in the center of a convoluted conspiracy (the title of his book is The Jefferson Conspiracies: A President’s Role in the Assassination of Meriwether Lewis) and states, among other things, that “Thomas Jefferson’s complicity is a substantial one and includes his endorsement of the suicide theory.… He accepted the stigma of suicide because he feared a greater scandal.” Less darkly, William Clark’s son, Meriwether Lewis Clark, said simply that he wished no stigma “upon the fair name I have the honor to bear.”

  Underlying the suicide-murder controversy run several streams of thought: it is a disgrace to die by suicide; that Lewis was too young or too successful to kill himself (neither of which, of course, protects against suicide); or that committing suicide is intrinsically a cowardly act and therefore a great and courageous man could not have done such a thing. Others have argued that Jefferson would not have appointed Lewis to command the westward expedition had he actually known of any mental instability in Lewis or his family line. This argument has been further buttressed by repeated assertions that, in any event, Jefferson could have had no way of knowing of any mental illness in Lewis’s family, despite the fact that Jefferson and Lewis had lived together for two years and presumably had had many intimate discussions which neither of them committed to paper. There is, in fact, no way of knowing what confidences about family and self they shared. It is difficult, short of weaving an elaborate conspiracy net, to imagine why Jefferson would write what he did about Lewis and his father’s family unless he believed it to be true. (Interestingly, there may have been instability on both sides of the family. Lewis’s half brother, Dr. John Marks, his mother’s son by her second marriage, at one point had to be confined because of “mental problems”; there was also a great deal of intermarriage, nearly a dozen marriages, between the Meriwether and Lewis families.)