December 2, 2009 • 24 mins
In 1809, Meriwether Lewis died of gunshot wounds -- but how did this happen? Historians still debate the circumstances involved. Join Katie and Sarah as they explore the facts -- and sensationalism -- surrounding the mysterious death of Meriwether Lewis.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff you Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Katie Lambert and I'm fair Dowdy, and today we're
gonna be talking about a history mystery. We've gotten a
(00:20):
lot of requests to talk about the Lewis and Clark expedition,
but considering that could easily be, oh, I don't know,
an hour long podcast, We've decided to focus on something
slightly more tangential but still related, very intriguing story too exactly,
and that is how did Merryweather Lewis Die? In eight nine,
(00:40):
Merryweather Lewis died from gunshot wounds on the Wild Matches Trace,
which was a road that goes from Natchez, Mississippi to Nashville,
and people have been obsessed since then about finding out
how he died obviously gunshot wounds, but what the story
was surrounding it. People from all different fields forensics, mental
(01:03):
health professionals, scholars. Some have constructed lunar cycles to discount
the witnesses testimony, and some have studied the ballistics and
analyzed the bullets, and people are just obsessed with this,
even though it happened two hundred years ago, and the
question is was it a murder or was it a suicide?
(01:24):
But before we get into that, let's go back to
the very beginning, because I hear that's a good place
to start. Sure as Marywether Lewis was born in August eighteen,
seventeen seventy four, near Charlottesville, actually really close to Monticello,
at Thomas Jefferson's home. This will come in later. Yeah,
and his father died serving in the Continental Army, and
(01:44):
the family relocated to Georgia for a little bit before
moving back to Virginia and um when when Louis was
a young man, he joined the Virginia Militia to help
suppress the Whiskey Rebellion and later enlisted the army. And
he's got a pretty impressive army career. He advances rapidly
(02:05):
and gets hooked up with Thomas Jefferson. UM. By eighteen
oh three, Jefferson has appointed him as the commander of
an expedition to explore the Louisiana Purchase, So pretty good
gig for young Merryweather and UM. He prepares for this
pretty diligently, studying all sorts of astronomy, botany, medicine, zoology,
(02:29):
something I didn't know about. I'm just imagining him a
frontiersman explore he did have some medical knowledge and other expeditions,
really studying up before this big expedition, and enlists his
friend William Clark to co command. And the Lewis and
Clark expedition, which is very briefly, covers eight thousand miles,
(02:49):
takes three years with the core of discovery, and Lewis
is the field scientist, so he's gathering specimens and keeping
really detailed journals. And at the end of this massive
trek he comes home again and he is a national
hero as his Clark they quote that most people know
is from Thomas Jefferson. His courage was undaunted, his firmness
(03:12):
and perseverance yielded to nothing but impossibilities. A rigid disciplinarian,
yet tender as a father of those committed to his charge. Honest,
disinterested liberal with a sound understanding and a scrupulous fidelity
to truth, which is a long winded way of saying
he was pretty awesome, pretty stand up guy. Oh yeah.
So they were wined and dined, and Louis was named
(03:33):
the governor of the Upper Louisiana and Territory in eighteen
o seven, but instead of heading to St. Louis, which
is where he was supposed to be, he goes to
Philly to look for a publisher and an illustrator for
the journals, because that was supposed to be his big priority.
You get those journals published and let everyone know what
happened and what they found when they were exploring the purchase.
(03:54):
Philadelphia society loves him. He's extremely social. He may even
have proposed to a young lady while he was there.
But then he goes to Virginia still unmarried, and he
doesn't make it to St. Louis until a year after
his appointment, which Thomas Jefferson is not pleased about. And
he's not the sort of person i'd want to anger.
He doesn't really love being a governor either, because you
(04:15):
have to remember he's this, you know, young, outdoorsy frontiersman
type of guy. So he's just a bit stifled at
this desk job. Things aren't going well. His friends are
worried that he has a drinking problem, which they call
euphemistically his indisposition, and he seems to be depressed. But
when James Madison is made president in eighteen o nine.
(04:37):
He replaces Jefferson's cabinet, and the new Secretary of War,
William Eustace, won't pay Louis back for some very legitimate
expenses that Lewis had so on the expedition, right, So
Louis decides he's going to make his way to Washington
to take care of it. So he leaves St. Louis
and travels by the Mississippi River, departs the river at
(04:57):
the Chickasaw Bluffs near Memphis, and sets off on the
Natchez Trace for Washington, d C. And the Natchez Trace
at this point is one of the most important roads
in the United States. Um. It's actually an old Native
American game path, and like I said earlier, it stretches
(05:18):
from southern Mississippi all the way to Nashville, and Um
Jefferson has taken the trouble to expand the road and
make it a little easier to travel because he wants
to connect Mississippi and Alabama to the eastern United States
and really incorporate the new territories into the country. But
(05:43):
that's not to say it's an easy road to take.
It's pretty wide. Yeah, it's got cane brakes, and it
runs by cypress swamps, It crosses rivers and creeks um
as it's approaching the Eastern hardwood forest, it rises a
thousand feet, so it's a pretty tough road and it
hasn't intimidating nickname. It does. It's known as the Devil's Backbone,
(06:07):
and that's partly because of the geography, but it's mostly
because bandits are also lurking along the road waiting for travelers,
mostly people who have traveled down the Mississippi River selling
supplies to walk back up with all their money. But
there are a few little stops where you can go
(06:29):
and stay. A few inns along the way. Yeah, these
rough and tumble sort of places where you can stop,
spend the night, buy some new ammunition and supplies and um.
On October nine, Louis stops at one of these, it's
called Grinders Stand. It's this little inn in the Tennessee
Mountains run by a couple Mr. And Mrs Grinder. But Mr.
(06:50):
Grinder is not in the house. Mrs Grinder is and
sometime on the night of October tenth, Louis sustains a
gunshot wound to the head and also to the chest
and he's dead by sunrise the next morning. As we've
mentioned before, so again, what is it that happened. The
first theory is that he committed suicide, and a part
(07:11):
of the reason we think this is because of the
testimony of Mrs Grinder. Now, she does give a few
different testimonies over the years, so let's just clarify that
at the outset we're going to hear a lot of
stories from old Mrs Grinder. One part of Mrs Grinder's
story that we know is true is that Louis shows
up just with two servants, one his own named Parnia
(07:33):
and another unnamed servant, and his traveling companion, James Neelye,
is about a day behind. He's rounding up some stray
horses before he comes and meets up with Louis. He's
the one who actually takes care of the body, right, right,
So Mrs Grinder tells her account to James Neelye, and
he writes in a letter to Thomas Jefferson, Mrs Grinder
(07:54):
said that she noticed when Louis came that something was
just a little bit off. He didn't seem to be
of found mind. So she gives him the house, but
make sure she sleeps nearby in case something goes wrong,
and the servants also sleep nearby in the stable loft.
Around three am, she hears two pistol shots, so she
wakes up the servants and they get there and Lewis
(08:15):
has shot himself in the head and the chest. He
asks for water and then dies shortly thereafter. And again
Neelie's not there, so he only hears this later from
Mrs Grinder, and she doesn't see any of it. She
just hears it. She's oral witness, right, maybe not the
best account. Neelie also says in his letter to Jefferson
the possessions that he has of Lewis's. He's got his rifle,
(08:38):
his watch, his pistols, his tomahawk. But you have to
wonder why didn't nearly talk to the servant, Why didn't
he talk to Mrs Grinder's children, Why didn't he transcribe anything,
take good record, no even semi official inquest into this
very suspicious death. Everyone is quick to assume at suicide,
(08:59):
and this is Grinder gives a different testimony a couple
of years later to Alexander Wilson, who is an ornithologist
and was supposed to do the illustrations for the Journals
of All the Birds, And she tells him that she
was actually awake all night and she was listening to
Louis talk to himself this violent discourse. She compared him
to a lawyerd din h like he was questioning himself
(09:21):
back and forth. And she hears a shot and a thud,
and he says, oh Lord, and then there's another shot,
and he says, oh, Madam, give me some water and
heal my wounds, but she doesn't and instead watches him
through spaces between the logs, and the log catch is
so bizarre, and she says, she's frightened, right, it's not
the most flattering portrayal of oneself to give. So is
(09:44):
that or because she didn't want to say that before
saying that this is what she saw? Or is it
because she's just making this up as she goes along.
So she sees a body stagger outside and fall by
a tree, but he makes it back into his room,
and she can hear him scraping a bucket of water
with a gourd because he's still thirsty. And she waits
(10:05):
two hours before she sends her children to get the servants,
and this is the grizzly part. They find him with
his brains exposed. There's not a lot of blood, but
his forehead is completely gone, and he offers to pay
the servants to finish the job. So he dies two
hours later, and she says his last words were, I
am no coward, but I am so strong. It is
(10:26):
so hard to die. So in addition to Mrs Grinder's story,
we also have some contemporary descriptions of Louis's mental state
at the time, and the main one is Captain Gilbert Russell,
who was the commander of a fourt where Louis stayed.
Um wrote to Jefferson about three months after the death
(10:48):
and said that Louis was unstable and he was keeping
him there at the four until he seemed better. Um
and he also thought that liquor was a big part
of the problem and that Lewis's friend and Neely actually
encouraged this drinking. We're going to hear more about Neelie
later on. Nearly is a bit of a sketchy character,
but Russell makes a public statement two years after the death,
(11:11):
and again this is something that, much like Mrs Granger's testimony,
changes the longer time goes on, he calls Louis mentally
deranged when he arrived at Fort Pickering, and he also
says that the crew told him Louis had tried to
kill himself twice. He kept Louis at the ford until
he was better, but after he left he got worse,
and then says that he destroyed himself in the most cool,
(11:33):
desperate and barbarian like manner, And again he places some
blame on Neelie, who he thinks contributed to his ills.
And his account also mentions a detail about razors, about
Louis cutting himself head to foot with razors, which again
makes no sense. After you shut yourself in the head
(11:53):
and shot yourself in the chest, why would you be
cutting yourself from head to foot with a razor. And
you were saying earlier, I thought this was interesting that
that sounds like a very different kind of suicide, a
different kind of person. Self mutilation is much different from
someone who actually wants to end it. And one scholar,
Thomas DeNisi, who's a Lewis and Clark scholar, said that
(12:14):
he thought perhaps Clark had malaria. And in severe cases,
you can be in a lot of pain and people
may try to get at that pain in a self
harming sort of way. So maybe that had something. So
it wasn't necessarily a suicide but an accident, right. But
we nevertheless, we have a lot of motives possible motives
(12:34):
for Merriwether Lewis's suicide, things that could have contributed if
he was already in a propressed state of mind, financial
problems here, he is going to d C two explain
himself basically, Um, he's thought to be unlucky and love.
Maybe a broken proposal or refused proposal. He's not very
(12:56):
good at being governor. He's an outdoorsy type and not
suited to a desk job. One and one that I
think a writery type of people can empathize with. He
could not seem to get these that was his main job.
He had to get them compiled, He had to get
them illustrated and published. That was why he was there,
and he couldn't seem to do it. Yeah, the drinking
(13:18):
problem that too, and then uh. An epidemiologist has suggested
that Louis has syphilis as well, which can lead to
dementia and suicide. Um, it can drive you crazy basically,
and some also have suggested that he may have been
addicted to laudanum, which again drug addiction can obviously affect
(13:39):
your mental state. So this makes a pretty good case
for the suicide camp, and we have some pretty big
names in that suicide camp. James Neely had told Thomas
Jefferson that Louis appeared at times deranged in mind. William Clark,
of course, his good friend, thought that Louis committed suicide
even before he heard it for real. He'd seen a
report in the New Paper that he killed himself and said,
(14:02):
I fear, oh, I fear the weight of his mind
has overcome him. What will be the consequence? He never
even questioned that it was suicide, and neither did Thomas
Jefferson or Molon Dickerson, who were very good friends of Lewis's.
Stephen Ambrose, who wrote the Lewis biography Undaunted Courage, says
it was definitely a suicide, as does historian named Paul
Russell Cutwright. So again we've got some pretty good names
(14:24):
in the suicide camp. But then there's also a murder
faction who believe that Merywether Lewis did not take his
own life, but was in fact murdered. So Lewis's family,
or at least a lot of them, believe that he
was murdered. And that's a pretty understandable thing for his
family to think. Suicide is not you know, he still
(14:48):
carries a bit of a stigma. Yeah, And um, Lewis's
mother particularly did not want to believe that her son
killed himself. Um. Then there's this sort of weird story
that you'll see presented is fact and a lot of
sources that there was a Tennessee commission that later studied
Lewis's remain They had an inquest and issued a report
(15:11):
saying it was more probable that he died at the
hands of an assassin, but that this report was very
flawed and that they didn't give any reason for why
they came to this conclusion. But the whole thing is
not you know, we can't find any records that has
ever happened at all, and in fact found several things
that said no, this never happened. There were no courthouse
records that were burned, destroyed. This was just another of
(15:34):
the wild rumors. But regardless of that, the murder theory
does pick up some steam, and especially in the eighteen
forties people start looking into that more. But you said
that some people believed it was murder right from the start.
But I like the explanations for um, for why it
(15:54):
might have been murdered. Some things about it are pretty fishy,
um one. I mean, the major point is that Lewis
was a good shot, and why did he carried a
sixty nine caliber pistol? And how do you shoot yourself
in the head with a sixty nine caliber pistol and
lived to shoot yourself again? Um? So that's an interesting point.
(16:16):
It's not really pointing fingers at any assassin, but it's
an interesting reason why it might not be a suicide, right,
And part of it was about the trajectory. Nearly wrote
in one of his letters, at the second shot had
entered and passed downward through his body and then came
out low down near his backbone. And some have said, well,
(16:37):
that wouldn't make sense if it was a self inflicted wound.
But we provided some potential motives for the suicide. So
we've got idea the same for the murder. Who who
might have murdered marywether Lewis. Well, our first suspect would
be the traveling companion Neelie who Eldon Swinard, who's the
authority on the medical history of the whole Lewis and
(16:58):
Clark expedition. That's who he think is our best culprit,
and he's the one suggesting that the bullet trajectory is
off right. And he also says that Louis may have
found nearly going through his stuff and nearly shot him.
In general, Neely's a really sketchy character and he doesn't
come off well by anyone's accounts. He never even gives
Louis's stuff to his family, and he's not a friend
(17:21):
of Louis's. He's a government Indian agent that Lewis runs
into at Fort Pickering during his difficulties and being kept
there because he's in a such a depressive state, right
and he's happy to find a traveling companion. Another thing
that people have pointed out that's strange about his behavior
is that he sent his servant with Louis and Pernia,
who was Louis's servant, instead of keeping him to help
(17:45):
his own mission of finding these stray horses. And why
would he do that? That doesn't make a lot of sense,
And also why didn't he get better accounts of Louis's death,
is it because he had something to hide, So he's
actually a fairly credible suspect if you're going with a
murder theory, and so is Lewis's servant, Parniam. Parnia went
(18:05):
straight to Jefferson after the death, saying it was a suicide.
Then he goes to the family saying that Louis owes
the money two forty dollars, and the family thinks that
he might have been the one who murdered Louis if
Lewis murder, and he's a somewhat credible person because he
would have had the opportunity to. Yeah, he dies only
(18:28):
seven months after Louis though, overdosing on laud in them
on purpose. They think, so that would be to suicides
in a row. Some say, and this is one of
the more insane theories. Get weirder and weirder. We're not
going to give this one any credence that this was
a conspiracy involving Thomas Jefferson. That's the account of David
Leon Chandler, and he says that Jefferson wanted Louis assassinated
(18:51):
because he knew Thomas Jefferson's deep dark secrets. What these
secrets are, I don't know, but that's not a very
incredible idea. Or other wild suspect is Mr Grinder, who
was tried for murder, except that there are absolutely no
trial documents to back this up. Um Some people have
suggested that there was maybe some romantic relationship between Lewis
(19:15):
and Mrs Grinder and dangerous liaison, but the only the
only point we should make about the Grinders, though, is
that they were very poor and shortly after this they
have enough money to buy land and slaves, so they
did get something out of this, something, something happened to
them after the death and Grinder. Mr Grinder is a
(19:36):
little sketchy too. He um illegally sold whiskey to Indians
and they were basically just trying to make money anyway
they could, so we can keep them on the table.
Unlike another suspect, James Wilkinson, and Wilkinson was involved with
Aaron Burr. They have a plot with the Spanish government
to make an entirely separate nation from the Mississippi Valley
(19:57):
through parts of the Southwest, but wilcomeson betrayed burd to
hide his own treason, and he ends up in New
Orleans commanding troops and therefore had the power to keep
anyone from entering or leaving the mouth of the Mississippi.
He was also governor of Louisiana before Louis, and he
was accepting lots of money from Spain. So some have said,
(20:18):
what if Lewis found out calling his treason and right
and will be had thatched snuffed? Um And then remember
we are at a seedy little inn on the Natchez
trace the devil's backbone, so it might have been a robber. Um.
There was also a rumor going around at the time
(20:39):
that Louis had discovered a gold mine and mapped it out,
and people thought this was true, even though not um,
So anybody could have been trying to steal this information
about the gold goonies style yea and our last sort
(21:02):
of sketchy account from Mrs Grinder. She was interviewed again
thirty years after Louis's death, and this time she tells
again a completely different story. It has very little in
common with the other two. She says that armed men
had come to the inn and that Louis had challenged
them to a duel, and she also says that the
servants stayed with Louis. Well, remember before she said they'd
(21:24):
stayed in a stable loft. In the middle of the night,
she hears three shots, and she sees Louis crawling in
the road on all fours. And when she sees Pernia,
his servant, he was wearing Louis's clothes, which he then
quickly said Louis had given to him. And some of
this account actually makes sense, that some of it's completely ridiculous.
She says at one point that after he was shot,
(21:45):
he said, oh Lord, Congress, relieve me, which I don't
think is the kind of thing when excla And another
point that we'd like to make is that Merywether Louis Clark,
who was Clark's son but named for Mary mother Lewis,
may also have wanted to take away the stigma of
suicide for Lewis, so stoked this murder right in later years,
(22:09):
A professor of law and forensic science, James Stars, says
in that maybe the best way we can find out
definitively whether it's murder or suicide, as if we exhume
Marywether Lewis's body and his descendants agree to it they
all sign off they want to know what happened to
The National Park Service turned down this request because Louis
(22:32):
is buried on UH park grounds, but you know, they
don't want everyone exhuming remains, digging up all the national
money to see what's under them. But the request has
been renewed at the urging of his descendants. And there's
also spin on it that's not so grizzly, not just
(22:56):
you know, was he murdered or was it a suicide.
They're also suggesting we could learn a lot about Lewis,
his physical characteristics, how tall he was, maybe whether he
had syphilis right when his health was like in general. Yeah,
and we have mitochondrial DNA samples from Lewis's female descendants,
so we would be able to confirm the body. And
(23:17):
then we could also test for gunpowder, residue, skull fractures,
things like that with which um, with our modern knowledge
of forensics, might help us figure out what happened. So
let us know what you think. Cast your vote for
murder or Suicide and email us at History Podcast at
(23:38):
how staff works dot com. You can still visit the
grave site and reproduction of Grinder's stand. I've actually been
to the Natchez Trace twice this past summer. Although I
missed this I didn't know about it yet still wait
to rebbin in our faces there thinks along well, that
about does it for the death of merrywether Lewis that
(23:59):
we as far as we know now. Maybe we can
do an update podcast if the National Park Services change
their mind. And if you're interested in something grizzly like
exhuming bodies, search for how body Farms work on our
homepage at www dot how stuff works dot com. For
more on this and thousands of other topics, visit how
(24:20):
stuff works dot com. Let us know what you think,
Send an email to podcast at how stuff works dot com,
and be sure to check out the stuff you missed
in history Class blog on the how stuff works dot
com homepage
Welcome to Stuff you Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Katie Lambert and I'm fair Dowdy, and today we're
gonna be talking about a history mystery. We've gotten a
(00:20):
lot of requests to talk about the Lewis and Clark expedition,
but considering that could easily be, oh, I don't know,
an hour long podcast, We've decided to focus on something
slightly more tangential but still related, very intriguing story too exactly,
and that is how did Merryweather Lewis Die? In eight nine,
(00:40):
Merryweather Lewis died from gunshot wounds on the Wild Matches Trace,
which was a road that goes from Natchez, Mississippi to Nashville,
and people have been obsessed since then about finding out
how he died obviously gunshot wounds, but what the story
was surrounding it. People from all different fields forensics, mental
(01:03):
health professionals, scholars. Some have constructed lunar cycles to discount
the witnesses testimony, and some have studied the ballistics and
analyzed the bullets, and people are just obsessed with this,
even though it happened two hundred years ago, and the
question is was it a murder or was it a suicide?
(01:24):
But before we get into that, let's go back to
the very beginning, because I hear that's a good place
to start. Sure as Marywether Lewis was born in August eighteen,
seventeen seventy four, near Charlottesville, actually really close to Monticello,
at Thomas Jefferson's home. This will come in later. Yeah,
and his father died serving in the Continental Army, and
(01:44):
the family relocated to Georgia for a little bit before
moving back to Virginia and um when when Louis was
a young man, he joined the Virginia Militia to help
suppress the Whiskey Rebellion and later enlisted the army. And
he's got a pretty impressive army career. He advances rapidly
(02:05):
and gets hooked up with Thomas Jefferson. UM. By eighteen
oh three, Jefferson has appointed him as the commander of
an expedition to explore the Louisiana Purchase, So pretty good
gig for young Merryweather and UM. He prepares for this
pretty diligently, studying all sorts of astronomy, botany, medicine, zoology,
(02:29):
something I didn't know about. I'm just imagining him a
frontiersman explore he did have some medical knowledge and other expeditions,
really studying up before this big expedition, and enlists his
friend William Clark to co command. And the Lewis and
Clark expedition, which is very briefly, covers eight thousand miles,
(02:49):
takes three years with the core of discovery, and Lewis
is the field scientist, so he's gathering specimens and keeping
really detailed journals. And at the end of this massive
trek he comes home again and he is a national
hero as his Clark they quote that most people know
is from Thomas Jefferson. His courage was undaunted, his firmness
(03:12):
and perseverance yielded to nothing but impossibilities. A rigid disciplinarian,
yet tender as a father of those committed to his charge. Honest,
disinterested liberal with a sound understanding and a scrupulous fidelity
to truth, which is a long winded way of saying
he was pretty awesome, pretty stand up guy. Oh yeah.
So they were wined and dined, and Louis was named
(03:33):
the governor of the Upper Louisiana and Territory in eighteen
o seven, but instead of heading to St. Louis, which
is where he was supposed to be, he goes to
Philly to look for a publisher and an illustrator for
the journals, because that was supposed to be his big priority.
You get those journals published and let everyone know what
happened and what they found when they were exploring the purchase.
(03:54):
Philadelphia society loves him. He's extremely social. He may even
have proposed to a young lady while he was there.
But then he goes to Virginia still unmarried, and he
doesn't make it to St. Louis until a year after
his appointment, which Thomas Jefferson is not pleased about. And
he's not the sort of person i'd want to anger.
He doesn't really love being a governor either, because you
(04:15):
have to remember he's this, you know, young, outdoorsy frontiersman
type of guy. So he's just a bit stifled at
this desk job. Things aren't going well. His friends are
worried that he has a drinking problem, which they call
euphemistically his indisposition, and he seems to be depressed. But
when James Madison is made president in eighteen o nine.
(04:37):
He replaces Jefferson's cabinet, and the new Secretary of War,
William Eustace, won't pay Louis back for some very legitimate
expenses that Lewis had so on the expedition, right, So
Louis decides he's going to make his way to Washington
to take care of it. So he leaves St. Louis
and travels by the Mississippi River, departs the river at
(04:57):
the Chickasaw Bluffs near Memphis, and sets off on the
Natchez Trace for Washington, d C. And the Natchez Trace
at this point is one of the most important roads
in the United States. Um. It's actually an old Native
American game path, and like I said earlier, it stretches
(05:18):
from southern Mississippi all the way to Nashville, and Um
Jefferson has taken the trouble to expand the road and
make it a little easier to travel because he wants
to connect Mississippi and Alabama to the eastern United States
and really incorporate the new territories into the country. But
(05:43):
that's not to say it's an easy road to take.
It's pretty wide. Yeah, it's got cane brakes, and it
runs by cypress swamps, It crosses rivers and creeks um
as it's approaching the Eastern hardwood forest, it rises a
thousand feet, so it's a pretty tough road and it
hasn't intimidating nickname. It does. It's known as the Devil's Backbone,
(06:07):
and that's partly because of the geography, but it's mostly
because bandits are also lurking along the road waiting for travelers,
mostly people who have traveled down the Mississippi River selling
supplies to walk back up with all their money. But
there are a few little stops where you can go
(06:29):
and stay. A few inns along the way. Yeah, these
rough and tumble sort of places where you can stop,
spend the night, buy some new ammunition and supplies and um.
On October nine, Louis stops at one of these, it's
called Grinders Stand. It's this little inn in the Tennessee
Mountains run by a couple Mr. And Mrs Grinder. But Mr.
(06:50):
Grinder is not in the house. Mrs Grinder is and
sometime on the night of October tenth, Louis sustains a
gunshot wound to the head and also to the chest
and he's dead by sunrise the next morning. As we've
mentioned before, so again, what is it that happened. The
first theory is that he committed suicide, and a part
(07:11):
of the reason we think this is because of the
testimony of Mrs Grinder. Now, she does give a few
different testimonies over the years, so let's just clarify that
at the outset we're going to hear a lot of
stories from old Mrs Grinder. One part of Mrs Grinder's
story that we know is true is that Louis shows
up just with two servants, one his own named Parnia
(07:33):
and another unnamed servant, and his traveling companion, James Neelye,
is about a day behind. He's rounding up some stray
horses before he comes and meets up with Louis. He's
the one who actually takes care of the body, right, right,
So Mrs Grinder tells her account to James Neelye, and
he writes in a letter to Thomas Jefferson, Mrs Grinder
(07:54):
said that she noticed when Louis came that something was
just a little bit off. He didn't seem to be
of found mind. So she gives him the house, but
make sure she sleeps nearby in case something goes wrong,
and the servants also sleep nearby in the stable loft.
Around three am, she hears two pistol shots, so she
wakes up the servants and they get there and Lewis
(08:15):
has shot himself in the head and the chest. He
asks for water and then dies shortly thereafter. And again
Neelie's not there, so he only hears this later from
Mrs Grinder, and she doesn't see any of it. She
just hears it. She's oral witness, right, maybe not the
best account. Neelie also says in his letter to Jefferson
the possessions that he has of Lewis's. He's got his rifle,
(08:38):
his watch, his pistols, his tomahawk. But you have to
wonder why didn't nearly talk to the servant, Why didn't
he talk to Mrs Grinder's children, Why didn't he transcribe anything,
take good record, no even semi official inquest into this
very suspicious death. Everyone is quick to assume at suicide,
(08:59):
and this is Grinder gives a different testimony a couple
of years later to Alexander Wilson, who is an ornithologist
and was supposed to do the illustrations for the Journals
of All the Birds, And she tells him that she
was actually awake all night and she was listening to
Louis talk to himself this violent discourse. She compared him
to a lawyerd din h like he was questioning himself
(09:21):
back and forth. And she hears a shot and a thud,
and he says, oh Lord, and then there's another shot,
and he says, oh, Madam, give me some water and
heal my wounds, but she doesn't and instead watches him
through spaces between the logs, and the log catch is
so bizarre, and she says, she's frightened, right, it's not
the most flattering portrayal of oneself to give. So is
(09:44):
that or because she didn't want to say that before
saying that this is what she saw? Or is it
because she's just making this up as she goes along.
So she sees a body stagger outside and fall by
a tree, but he makes it back into his room,
and she can hear him scraping a bucket of water
with a gourd because he's still thirsty. And she waits
(10:05):
two hours before she sends her children to get the servants,
and this is the grizzly part. They find him with
his brains exposed. There's not a lot of blood, but
his forehead is completely gone, and he offers to pay
the servants to finish the job. So he dies two
hours later, and she says his last words were, I
am no coward, but I am so strong. It is
(10:26):
so hard to die. So in addition to Mrs Grinder's story,
we also have some contemporary descriptions of Louis's mental state
at the time, and the main one is Captain Gilbert Russell,
who was the commander of a fourt where Louis stayed.
Um wrote to Jefferson about three months after the death
(10:48):
and said that Louis was unstable and he was keeping
him there at the four until he seemed better. Um
and he also thought that liquor was a big part
of the problem and that Lewis's friend and Neely actually
encouraged this drinking. We're going to hear more about Neelie
later on. Nearly is a bit of a sketchy character,
but Russell makes a public statement two years after the death,
(11:11):
and again this is something that, much like Mrs Granger's testimony,
changes the longer time goes on, he calls Louis mentally
deranged when he arrived at Fort Pickering, and he also
says that the crew told him Louis had tried to
kill himself twice. He kept Louis at the ford until
he was better, but after he left he got worse,
and then says that he destroyed himself in the most cool,
(11:33):
desperate and barbarian like manner, And again he places some
blame on Neelie, who he thinks contributed to his ills.
And his account also mentions a detail about razors, about
Louis cutting himself head to foot with razors, which again
makes no sense. After you shut yourself in the head
(11:53):
and shot yourself in the chest, why would you be
cutting yourself from head to foot with a razor. And
you were saying earlier, I thought this was interesting that
that sounds like a very different kind of suicide, a
different kind of person. Self mutilation is much different from
someone who actually wants to end it. And one scholar,
Thomas DeNisi, who's a Lewis and Clark scholar, said that
(12:14):
he thought perhaps Clark had malaria. And in severe cases,
you can be in a lot of pain and people
may try to get at that pain in a self
harming sort of way. So maybe that had something. So
it wasn't necessarily a suicide but an accident, right. But
we nevertheless, we have a lot of motives possible motives
(12:34):
for Merriwether Lewis's suicide, things that could have contributed if
he was already in a propressed state of mind, financial
problems here, he is going to d C two explain
himself basically, Um, he's thought to be unlucky and love.
Maybe a broken proposal or refused proposal. He's not very
(12:56):
good at being governor. He's an outdoorsy type and not
suited to a desk job. One and one that I
think a writery type of people can empathize with. He
could not seem to get these that was his main job.
He had to get them compiled, He had to get
them illustrated and published. That was why he was there,
and he couldn't seem to do it. Yeah, the drinking
(13:18):
problem that too, and then uh. An epidemiologist has suggested
that Louis has syphilis as well, which can lead to
dementia and suicide. Um, it can drive you crazy basically,
and some also have suggested that he may have been
addicted to laudanum, which again drug addiction can obviously affect
(13:39):
your mental state. So this makes a pretty good case
for the suicide camp, and we have some pretty big
names in that suicide camp. James Neely had told Thomas
Jefferson that Louis appeared at times deranged in mind. William Clark,
of course, his good friend, thought that Louis committed suicide
even before he heard it for real. He'd seen a
report in the New Paper that he killed himself and said,
(14:02):
I fear, oh, I fear the weight of his mind
has overcome him. What will be the consequence? He never
even questioned that it was suicide, and neither did Thomas
Jefferson or Molon Dickerson, who were very good friends of Lewis's.
Stephen Ambrose, who wrote the Lewis biography Undaunted Courage, says
it was definitely a suicide, as does historian named Paul
Russell Cutwright. So again we've got some pretty good names
(14:24):
in the suicide camp. But then there's also a murder
faction who believe that Merywether Lewis did not take his
own life, but was in fact murdered. So Lewis's family,
or at least a lot of them, believe that he
was murdered. And that's a pretty understandable thing for his
family to think. Suicide is not you know, he still
(14:48):
carries a bit of a stigma. Yeah, And um, Lewis's
mother particularly did not want to believe that her son
killed himself. Um. Then there's this sort of weird story
that you'll see presented is fact and a lot of
sources that there was a Tennessee commission that later studied
Lewis's remain They had an inquest and issued a report
(15:11):
saying it was more probable that he died at the
hands of an assassin, but that this report was very
flawed and that they didn't give any reason for why
they came to this conclusion. But the whole thing is
not you know, we can't find any records that has
ever happened at all, and in fact found several things
that said no, this never happened. There were no courthouse
records that were burned, destroyed. This was just another of
(15:34):
the wild rumors. But regardless of that, the murder theory
does pick up some steam, and especially in the eighteen
forties people start looking into that more. But you said
that some people believed it was murder right from the start.
But I like the explanations for um, for why it
(15:54):
might have been murdered. Some things about it are pretty fishy,
um one. I mean, the major point is that Lewis
was a good shot, and why did he carried a
sixty nine caliber pistol? And how do you shoot yourself
in the head with a sixty nine caliber pistol and
lived to shoot yourself again? Um? So that's an interesting point.
(16:16):
It's not really pointing fingers at any assassin, but it's
an interesting reason why it might not be a suicide, right,
And part of it was about the trajectory. Nearly wrote
in one of his letters, at the second shot had
entered and passed downward through his body and then came
out low down near his backbone. And some have said, well,
(16:37):
that wouldn't make sense if it was a self inflicted wound.
But we provided some potential motives for the suicide. So
we've got idea the same for the murder. Who who
might have murdered marywether Lewis. Well, our first suspect would
be the traveling companion Neelie who Eldon Swinard, who's the
authority on the medical history of the whole Lewis and
(16:58):
Clark expedition. That's who he think is our best culprit,
and he's the one suggesting that the bullet trajectory is
off right. And he also says that Louis may have
found nearly going through his stuff and nearly shot him.
In general, Neely's a really sketchy character and he doesn't
come off well by anyone's accounts. He never even gives
Louis's stuff to his family, and he's not a friend
(17:21):
of Louis's. He's a government Indian agent that Lewis runs
into at Fort Pickering during his difficulties and being kept
there because he's in a such a depressive state, right
and he's happy to find a traveling companion. Another thing
that people have pointed out that's strange about his behavior
is that he sent his servant with Louis and Pernia,
who was Louis's servant, instead of keeping him to help
(17:45):
his own mission of finding these stray horses. And why
would he do that? That doesn't make a lot of sense,
And also why didn't he get better accounts of Louis's death,
is it because he had something to hide, So he's
actually a fairly credible suspect if you're going with a
murder theory, and so is Lewis's servant, Parniam. Parnia went
(18:05):
straight to Jefferson after the death, saying it was a suicide.
Then he goes to the family saying that Louis owes
the money two forty dollars, and the family thinks that
he might have been the one who murdered Louis if
Lewis murder, and he's a somewhat credible person because he
would have had the opportunity to. Yeah, he dies only
(18:28):
seven months after Louis though, overdosing on laud in them
on purpose. They think, so that would be to suicides
in a row. Some say, and this is one of
the more insane theories. Get weirder and weirder. We're not
going to give this one any credence that this was
a conspiracy involving Thomas Jefferson. That's the account of David
Leon Chandler, and he says that Jefferson wanted Louis assassinated
(18:51):
because he knew Thomas Jefferson's deep dark secrets. What these
secrets are, I don't know, but that's not a very
incredible idea. Or other wild suspect is Mr Grinder, who
was tried for murder, except that there are absolutely no
trial documents to back this up. Um Some people have
suggested that there was maybe some romantic relationship between Lewis
(19:15):
and Mrs Grinder and dangerous liaison, but the only the
only point we should make about the Grinders, though, is
that they were very poor and shortly after this they
have enough money to buy land and slaves, so they
did get something out of this, something, something happened to
them after the death and Grinder. Mr Grinder is a
(19:36):
little sketchy too. He um illegally sold whiskey to Indians
and they were basically just trying to make money anyway
they could, so we can keep them on the table.
Unlike another suspect, James Wilkinson, and Wilkinson was involved with
Aaron Burr. They have a plot with the Spanish government
to make an entirely separate nation from the Mississippi Valley
(19:57):
through parts of the Southwest, but wilcomeson betrayed burd to
hide his own treason, and he ends up in New
Orleans commanding troops and therefore had the power to keep
anyone from entering or leaving the mouth of the Mississippi.
He was also governor of Louisiana before Louis, and he
was accepting lots of money from Spain. So some have said,
(20:18):
what if Lewis found out calling his treason and right
and will be had thatched snuffed? Um And then remember
we are at a seedy little inn on the Natchez
trace the devil's backbone, so it might have been a robber. Um.
There was also a rumor going around at the time
(20:39):
that Louis had discovered a gold mine and mapped it out,
and people thought this was true, even though not um,
So anybody could have been trying to steal this information
about the gold goonies style yea and our last sort
(21:02):
of sketchy account from Mrs Grinder. She was interviewed again
thirty years after Louis's death, and this time she tells
again a completely different story. It has very little in
common with the other two. She says that armed men
had come to the inn and that Louis had challenged
them to a duel, and she also says that the
servants stayed with Louis. Well, remember before she said they'd
(21:24):
stayed in a stable loft. In the middle of the night,
she hears three shots, and she sees Louis crawling in
the road on all fours. And when she sees Pernia,
his servant, he was wearing Louis's clothes, which he then
quickly said Louis had given to him. And some of
this account actually makes sense, that some of it's completely ridiculous.
She says at one point that after he was shot,
(21:45):
he said, oh Lord, Congress, relieve me, which I don't
think is the kind of thing when excla And another
point that we'd like to make is that Merywether Louis Clark,
who was Clark's son but named for Mary mother Lewis,
may also have wanted to take away the stigma of
suicide for Lewis, so stoked this murder right in later years,
(22:09):
A professor of law and forensic science, James Stars, says
in that maybe the best way we can find out
definitively whether it's murder or suicide, as if we exhume
Marywether Lewis's body and his descendants agree to it they
all sign off they want to know what happened to
The National Park Service turned down this request because Louis
(22:32):
is buried on UH park grounds, but you know, they
don't want everyone exhuming remains, digging up all the national
money to see what's under them. But the request has
been renewed at the urging of his descendants. And there's
also spin on it that's not so grizzly, not just
(22:56):
you know, was he murdered or was it a suicide.
They're also suggesting we could learn a lot about Lewis,
his physical characteristics, how tall he was, maybe whether he
had syphilis right when his health was like in general. Yeah,
and we have mitochondrial DNA samples from Lewis's female descendants,
so we would be able to confirm the body. And
(23:17):
then we could also test for gunpowder, residue, skull fractures,
things like that with which um, with our modern knowledge
of forensics, might help us figure out what happened. So
let us know what you think. Cast your vote for
murder or Suicide and email us at History Podcast at
(23:38):
how staff works dot com. You can still visit the
grave site and reproduction of Grinder's stand. I've actually been
to the Natchez Trace twice this past summer. Although I
missed this I didn't know about it yet still wait
to rebbin in our faces there thinks along well, that
about does it for the death of merrywether Lewis that
(23:59):
we as far as we know now. Maybe we can
do an update podcast if the National Park Services change
their mind. And if you're interested in something grizzly like
exhuming bodies, search for how body Farms work on our
homepage at www dot how stuff works dot com. For
more on this and thousands of other topics, visit how
(24:20):
stuff works dot com. Let us know what you think,
Send an email to podcast at how stuff works dot com,
and be sure to check out the stuff you missed
in history Class blog on the how stuff works dot
com homepage
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