Tragedy, fame awaited at end
Clark's rise countered by Lewis' suicide

By John Krist,
Senior reporter

Photo by John Krist The truncated shaft atop Lewis' grave symbolizes a life cut short. He was only 35 when he fatally shot himself, dying shortly after sunrise on Oct. 11, 1809 — just three years after leading his exploring party safely home from its journey across the West.

NATCHEZ TRACE PARKWAY, Tenn. — This is where the story ends, in a gloomy clearing encircled by trees and haunted by ghosts.

It is raining. Heavy black clouds drag their bellies across the wooded hilltops, periodically unleashing cascades of lightning and waves of thunder that roll down the valley of the Tennessee River. I'm sitting in my truck, eating lunch and watching warm drizzle draw a veil across the soggy meadow before me. At one end of the clearing is a rough log cabin, no bigger than a suburban two-car garage. At the other, 150 yards away, is a stone obelisk. The shaft appears broken, its summit ragged.

I have traveled into the past. Except for my own presence, and that of my Detroit-built time machine, it could well be 1809. In that year, this clearing was the site of an inn called Grinder's Stand, a ramshackle home whose owners were willing to sell a meal and rent a bed to the occasional traveler on the nearby Natchez Trace.

Bits of the original inn's foundation poke through the grass just behind the log cabin, which is intended to be a replica of Grinder's Stand and houses a small National Park Service visitor center. It is a modest facility with much to be modest about: Exhibits are sketchy, it is unstaffed, and it offers but a handful of dusty brochures to satisfy the curiosity of visitors.

In the autumn of 1809, 35-year-old Meriwether Lewis — former private secretary to President Thomas Jefferson, recent co-commander with William Clark of the first expedition to explore the newly purchased Louisiana Territory, and lately the appointed governor of that territory — was traveling the trace on his way to Washington. He arrived at Grinder's Stand in the evening of Oct. 10, and rented a room.

By morning he was dead, apparently of self-inflicted gunshot wounds. The stone column at the far end of the clearing stands atop his grave, the truncated shaft symbolizing a life cut short. It is a curiously lonely and isolated resting place for the central character in one of the most remarkable of all American stories. Unanswered questions hover like phantoms in the thick, warm air.

A perilous reward

Photos by John Krist Although it was never much more than a path through the woods, the Natchez Trace was the most heavily traveled road in the region in the early 19th century. Portions of the original trace, such as this one, beckon visitors today.

The Natchez Trace, a wilderness highway established along the route of an old Indian trading trail, was never much more than a crude path through the woods, but in the early 1800s it was the region's most heavily traveled road. Running from Natchez on the Mississippi River across the Tennessee and terminating in Nashville on the Cumberland, it played a critical role in the transportation network that knit the nation together north and south, east and west.

Most of that network was water: Rivers were the superhighways of 19th century America, and the Mississippi, Tennessee, Cumberland and Ohio rivers were comparable to the modern interstate highway system. Freight haulers typically floated their goods down one of the big tributaries to the Mississippi River, selling both boat (as lumber) and cargo when they reached Natchez, New Orleans or some other downstream settlement. They'd then use the Natchez Trace as an overland shortcut home.

Since the 1930s, the National Park Service has been constructing a simple two-lane road that follows the approximate route of the historic trail more than 442 miles from Natchez, Miss., to a point just a few miles south of Nashville, Tenn. Named the Natchez Trace Parkway, the narrow road passes through a rural landscape for most of its length. Farm fields occasionally flank the winding strip of pavement, as do vast tracts of unbroken woodland. Nearby towns, when they exist at all, are generally small. Wild turkeys, turtles and deer are frequent obstacles to motorists. Bridges vault over clear streams that slide musically across cobbled beds.

In many places, it is possible to venture off the pavement and follow sections of the original trace, still persisting as a rutted pathway plunging through a riot of shrubs, vines and overhanging trees. Walking along it, as I did during a summer thunderstorm last year, is like creeping through a moist, green tunnel, so completely does vegetation enclose the old road.

Photos by John Krist A log cabin in the Tennessee hills is intended to replicate Grinder's Stand, the crude inn where Meriwether Lewis died in 1809. The building today houses a National Park Service visitor center on the Natchez Trace Parkway.

It probably looked about the same in the autumn of 1809, when desperation sent Lewis along the Natchez Trace. I could easily imagine the young explorer caught up in the turmoil of his own thoughts as his horse carried him through the woods, birdsong and insect clatter rising from the folded terrain, the fall air blessedly free of the damp heat that enfolds the Tennessee Valley in summer.

Like the other members of the Corps of Discovery, dispatched across the West in 1803 by President Thomas Jefferson to map and describe the region — and to search for the fabled Northwest Passage, an all-water route across the continent sought by explorers for three centuries — Lewis had been rewarded by his government for service on the long, dangerous expedition. Lewis' compensation, however, had introduced frustrating complexities into the life of a man ill-equipped to cope with them, and in 1809 he was headed to Washington in a desperate attempt to resolve some of the most pernicious.

Family and friends

After they reached the end of their 8,000-mile journey to the Pacific and back in September 1806, Lewis and Clark remained in St. Louis for more than a month, writing letters and settling the financial affairs of the expedition. The men needed clothes and supplies, and they hoped to draw advances against the back pay they were owed as well as the government land grants they had been promised for completing the 28-month trip.

Lewis approached local merchants, asking them to advance his men cash and goods in exchange for vouchers he guaranteed would be honored by the War Department. The commanders also raised money by holding a public auction of the guns, powder horns, kettles, axes and other equipment that had survived their trip. The men traded warrants for the land they'd been promised, or sold them at a discount to St. Louis traders. In the cash-poor 19th century West, IOUs and handshakes were common currency.

In November 1806, Lewis and Clark headed at last for their home state of Virginia. Less than two weeks later they split up. Clark went to visit friends (including his future wife) in Fincastle; Lewis headed for Charlottesville to visit family en route to an eventual rendezvous with President Thomas Jefferson in the capital city.

Lewis reached his family home on Dec. 13, and spent several days being wined and dined by the leading citizens of Charlottesville. Then he was off to meet his friend, mentor and patron in Washington, where he arrived Dec. 28. Lewis spent several days in Jefferson's company, celebrating New Year's Day with him. No accounts of their conversations survive, which is unfortunate, for Lewis had remarkable adventures to relate and Jefferson had always been fascinated by the West. It was a perfect match of storyteller, audience and subject.

In January 1807, Congress appointed a committee to decide what the government owed Lewis, Clark and the soldiers they'd led across the continent. Several weeks later, the committee recommended that the commanders each be given 1,600 acres of public land, that the enlisted men each be granted 320 acres, and that everyone receive double pay for the time they'd been away. (The pay scale at the time ranged from $5 a month for privates to $30 for Lt. Clark and $40 for Capt. Lewis.)

The total bill to the U.S. treasury came to about $11,000. Debate was long and bitter, opponents arguing that the sum was outrageously high, but a month later Congress reluctantly approved.

Jefferson had other rewards in mind, as well. He nominated Lewis to be governor of the Territory of Louisiana (the original Louisiana Purchase had been split into two parts: the Territory of New Orleans, encompassing what is today the state of Louisiana, and the Louisiana Territory, which was everything else). He nominated Clark as superintendent of Indian affairs for the Territory of Louisiana, with the rank of brigadier general of militia. Congress approved the appointments.

But as time passed, Jefferson's reward to Lewis proved to be a terrible burden. Backstabbing bureaucrats and plotting politicians bedeviled him, and government functionaries in Washington refused to honor the warrants with which he'd paid for some expedition expenses. These distractions interfered with Lewis' ability to meet his primary obligation: preparing the expedition journals — a treasure trove of scientific and geographic information — for publication so the rest of the world could share what he and his men had learned.

When Lewis headed for Washington in 1809, hoping to straighten out the political and financial mess in which he had become ensnared, he had yet to deliver a single page of the manuscript his publisher and Jefferson had been eagerly awaiting. The work he had promised would have cemented his place in scientific history, perhaps made him rich, and certainly would have repaid the tremendous trust placed in him at such a young age by Jefferson, a legendary intellect and towering political figure whose respect and friendship Lewis treasured.

But Lewis never wrote a line. He appears to have suffered one of the most spectacular cases of writer's block in history. It may, in fact, have proved fatal. No one will ever know what he was thinking and feeling as evening descended upon the clearing surrounding Grinder's Stand on Oct. 10, 1809, but surely the stress of his unfulfilled obligation weighed heavily upon him.

That night, he declined the innkeeper's offer to prepare a bed for him, preferring, he said, to sleep on the floor in his bear skins and buffalo robe. The choice suggests another dimension to Lewis' desperation: Perhaps he had been too changed by his experiences on the Great Plains, in the terrible Bitterroots, on the banks of the mighty Columbia. Perhaps Lewis' success in facing down aggressive grizzlies, leading scouting parties, even conducting diplomacy with native tribes rendered his old life too colorless and muddled by comparison.

It is always hard to disengage emotionally from a long, challenging undertaking. Caught between East and West, between civilization and the wilderness, longing for both and comfortable now in neither, Lewis was perhaps lost in a way few men have ever been lost. The man who had navigated across an unmapped landscape could not find a safe path into his own future.

Suicide or murder?

Not everyone believes Lewis committed suicide. Thieves were common along the Natchez Trace, and there are historians who speculate he was murdered, perhaps during a robbery attempt. But there is no hard evidence to support this theory, whereas the immediate reactions of those who know him best suggest that they had no trouble believing that the frequently depressed, hard-drinking young man — who been behaving erratically in the days before his death — had taken his own life.

"I fear this report has too much truth," Clark wrote in a letter to his brother upon receiving word of Lewis' apparent suicide. "I fear O! I fear the waight of his mind has over come him."

Jefferson, too, was not surprised to hear that Lewis had killed himself, telling friends that he had long been worried about the younger man. In 1813, composing a short biography of Lewis for the first published edition of the Lewis and Clark journals, Jefferson elaborated: "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 (Jefferson believed Lewis had inherited his father's tendency toward depression). 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 at St. Louis in sedentary occupations they returned upon him with redoubled vigor and began seriously to alarm his friends."

After Lewis' death, the expedition journals passed on to Clark, who had no idea what to do with them. After meeting with Jefferson to discuss the matter, Clark took the materials to Philadelphia and handed them over to Nicholas Biddle, a young lawyer and writer, who agreed to edit the notes and produce a narrative. It was not published until 1814 — eight years after the expedition concluded. The long delay between the expedition's return and publication of a comprehensive account of the journey left the nation and its leaders struggling to understand just what the expedition had accomplished and what it meant. (Full story.)

Limited edition

When the Biddle edition finally appeared, it consisted of only a single volume describing the expedition's adventures, and only 1,417 copies were printed. Absent was the scientific information the explorers had collected about the plants, animals, landscape and people of the newly explored land. None of that material would see print until 1893, when the next version of the journals was produced. In the interim, many of the plants and animals first described by Lewis and Clark in their unpublished notes were described in published works by other writers, who thus received credit they did not really deserve. Not until 1905 would a complete version of the expedition journals appear.

The expedition's specimens and collection of American Indian artifacts ended up being scattered. Jefferson kept some and displayed them in his Indian Hall at Monticello, which is being re-created for the celebration of the expedition bicentennial that begins there next month. (Click here for a schedule of bicentennial events.) Others he passed along to friends in the scientific community. Many of the plant and animal materials — bones, skins, antlers, pressed plants — ended up in the museum operated by Charles Wilson Peale inside Philadelphia's Independence Hall.

The Peale collection of Lewis and Clark materials remained largely intact until 1850, when it was broken up and sold. Half was purchased by showman P.T. Barnum, who displayed it in his American Museum in New York City. The museum and collection were incinerated during the Civil War draft riots in 1863.

Over time, much of the remaining material simply vanished. Most of the surviving plant specimens remain in Philadelphia at the American Academy of Natural Sciences. Most of the original journals and notebooks also reside there at the American Philosophical Society library. Bits and pieces may be found elsewhere, but actual expedition artifacts are extremely rare. (Click here for fuller accounting of the expedition's material legacy.)

The expedition members scattered even more quickly than the collection of specimens and artifacts. Many simply disappeared into the mists of history, others lived colorful lives on the frontier, but the Corps of Discovery never reunited.

A man of his time

Photos by John Krist In contrast to Lewis' solitary burial in a remote clearing, William Clark's grave occupies a prominent spot in St. Louis' huge Bellefontaine Cemetery, where his remains are surrounded by those of famous figures in the city's history.

Clark's life after the expedition was in many ways the opposite of that led by his friend Lewis. In 1808 he married Julia Hancock, for whom he had named the Judith's River in Montana three years earlier, and their first child was born in January 1809. In a profound tribute, they named him Meriwether Lewis Clark. (Lewis never married, despite having courted several women after he returned from the expedition.)

As he had promised, Clark adopted Sacagawea's son, Jean Baptiste, and raised him as his own. The boy who'd crossed the West as an infant was schooled in St. Louis, and then returned to the frontier. In 1823, when he was 18, Jean Baptiste met Prince Wilhelm of Wurtemberg, Germany, who was traveling across America on a scientific expedition. The prince was intrigued by the young man — well-educated, wilderness-savvy, half-French and half-Indian — and invited Jean Baptiste to return with him to Europe. He did, and spent six years at the royal court, becoming fluent in four languages.

He returned to the United States in 1829 and became a mountain man, trapping, hunting, guiding and exploring the West. He joined the Gold Rush to California, and for a time worked as a hotel clerk in Auburn, a boisterous mining town in the Sierra Nevada foothills. In 1866, he left Auburn and headed for new gold strikes in Montana. He fell ill on the journey, and died of pneumonia in Danner, Ore., where he is buried.

Just as he was more adept at romance, Clark was a more skilled politician than Lewis. After serving as superintendent of Indian affairs for the Territory of Louisiana, Clark was appointed governor of Missouri Territory, a post he held from 1813 to 1820. He ran for governor when Missouri became a state but lost, largely because he was viewed as being "too soft" in his concern for the Indians. Congress then appointed him superintendent of Indian affairs, with responsibility for tribes along the Missouri and Mississippi rivers, and he held that post from 1821 to 1838.

Although he was widely respected among the tribes for his fairness, he maintained a persistent blind spot when it came to the rights of those closer to him. York, the slave who had accompanied Clark during the expedition across the West — and who had been treated as an equal member of the company, allowed to carry a firearm and given a vote when important choices had to be made — returned home to find his status no different than before he had left. The circumstances chafed; according to letters Clark wrote to his brother, Jonathan, York believed his service during the 28-month journey warranted manumission. But Clark resisted.

"York ... is here but of verry little service to me, insolent and Sulky," Clark wrote to his brother on May 28, 1809. "I had to give him a severe trouncing the other day and he has much mended Sence."

Many of the nation's early heroes were slaveholders, Jefferson among them. But it comes as something of a shock to hear Clark, whose leadership of the Corps of Discovery often exhibited compassion and respect, casually relating that he had beaten the man whose life had been so intertwined with his in the wilderness. In another letter, he told his brother that he'd had to whip all of his slaves to keep them in line.

Clark, for all his accomplishments, was a man of his time and his culture. He apparently freed York eventually — or perhaps simply did not seek his return after hiring him out to a freight business in Louisville, Ky. — but he continued to own slaves until his death and even passed them on to his children in his will.

Like Lewis' unhappy and solitary end, Clark's casual brutality toward his slaves is a reminder that historical heroes were human and therefore flawed, and that perhaps it is their ability to accomplish great things despite such flaws that makes their achievements resonate so strongly across the years.

Filling up the canvas

Clark spent most of his life after the expedition living in St. Louis, and it is there that the story also ends: on a tree-shaded hilltop overlooking the busy streets and crowded neighborhoods of the city's north side.

Clark moved to St. Louis in 1808. He died 30 years later at the age of 68 and was entombed on a nearby farm owned by his nephew. When Bellefontaine Cemetery was established in 1849 in the rolling countryside north of the city, his remains were moved there and interred on a prominent knoll near those of several family members.

The cemetery is huge, 330 landscaped acres containing 14 miles of roads and nearly 85,000 graves. I arrived on a warm summer afternoon, stopped at the office and rang the bell.

An elderly gent let me in. I asked him to direct me to William Clark's grave, and he smiled and nodded knowingly. I asked if he had been hearing that request a lot lately, and he said, "Oh yes. And I'll probably be hearing it a lot more in the next couple years." He handed me some printed information about the cemetery and used a yellow highlighter to mark the route on a map. I got back into my truck and slowly followed the winding street past stately old trees shading a petrified forest of marble monuments, limestone crypts and granite headstones.

Clark's grave could not be more different from Lewis' simple, solitary burial in the Tennessee woods. The Clark monument is located in a commanding spot in a cemetery crowded with notable figures from the city's history, and is surrounded by family members' graves, including that of his firstborn son, Meriwether Lewis Clark. Elaborate granite carvings surround the grave and the tall obelisk that crowns it, including the sculpted heads of lions and bison. The bison are accurately represented, but the lions appear to be African. The carver must never have seen a cougar.

A bronze bust of Clark faces in the direction of the confluence of the Mississippi and Missouri rivers. Pictured as a young man, he seems to fix his gaze on a point beyond the horizon; his expression is contemplative, as if he is remembering a sweet summer evening by a campfire on the Upper Missouri, the rumbling of a passing buffalo herd joining coyote song to fill the Plains night with earthy music.

His epitaph reads:

"William Clark
Born in Virginia, August 1, 1770
Entered into life eternal
September 1, 1838
Soldier, Explorer
Statesman and Patriot
His life is written
In the history of his country."

Photos by John Krist Sculpted by William Ordway Partridge, a bronze bust of Clark at his grave faces toward the Mississippi-Missouri confluence. Clark's oldest son — Meriwether Lewis Clark — is buried nearby.

Another carved inscription provides a brief yet vivid resume:

"William Clark received his commission as lieutenant from George Washington in 1791. He was appointed brigadier general by Thomas Jefferson in 1807, and reappointed as such by James Madison in 1811. He was made governor of Missouri Territory by this president in 1813 and recommissioned twice by him, being again appointed governor by James Monroe in 1820, who also made him superintendent of Indian affairs in 1822. His great fame as an explorer was won on the expedition of 1804-5-6."

But it is a third inscription on the monument that seems to me the most compelling, for it speaks directly to my own experiences traveling in the footsteps of William Clark and Meriwether Lewis.

Nearly two years ago, I set out to retrace the path of the Corps of Discovery across the West, intending to use the explorers' experiences as a lens through which to examine the changes wrought in that landscape by subsequent generations. During my journey I followed a Missouri River that has been dredged, diked and dammed, crossed a once-vast grassland planted in crops and emptied of its enormous elk and bison herds, and explored rugged mountains peppered by clearcuts and million-dollar vacation homes.

I toured a nuclear wasteland on the banks of another great river, and followed that river past the giant dams that harnessed it and helped wipe out its salmon runs. I visited battlefields, impoverished reservations and the graves of massacre victims, reminders that the people who first called the West home shared the fate of its plundered wildlife.

But I also saw rolling hills covered with rich grain, and expanses of pristine prairie and ancient forest so achingly lovely as to steal my breath. I passed through small towns lost in the immensity of the Plains yet retaining their identity, and heard Lakota lamentations and victory songs keening from the radio in my truck. I shared meals and drinks and stories with men and women — some descended from white settlers, others tracing their ancestry back to the dawn of human history in North America — whose lives remain intimately entwined with the Western landscape.

The thread linking past and present in the landscape of Lewis and Clark is contained within the biblical passage inscribed on the monument atop William Clark's grave. The words, excerpted from Deuteronomy 1:21, sum up with simple eloquence what transpired in the West as Americans filled up the canvas Jefferson's generation began.

"Behold, the Lord thy God hath set the land before thee," the inscription reads. "Go up and possess it."

And we did.