Meriwether Lewis Dies on the Natchez Trace, 1809

Three years after returning from the Pacific Coast with William Clark, Meriwether Lewis was in serious trouble. He had been appointed governor of Louisiana Territory following the expedition, and by the fall of eighteen oh nine he was traveling to Washington to dispute financial accounts that threatened to ruin him. He was thirty-five years old and had not been doing well. His friends and colleagues had noticed the signs: depression, heavy drinking, a man increasingly difficult to recognize as the person who had navigated four thousand miles of unmapped river and mountain.

On the evening of October tenth, eighteen oh nine, Lewis stopped at a wayside inn called Grinder's Stand, seventy-five miles southwest of Nashville, on the Natchez Trace in Tennessee. The inn was operated by a woman named Priscilla Grinder. Her husband was away. In the early hours of October eleventh, Lewis was found with two gunshot wounds. He died before sunrise.

Whether he was murdered or died by his own hand has been debated for more than two hundred years. William Clark, who knew him better than almost anyone alive, believed he had been killed. Most modern historians, examining the same evidence, accept suicide, citing his documented history of depression and the unlikelihood that a robber would have left his money and possessions behind. The mystery has never been resolved to universal satisfaction, and at this point it probably cannot be.

The state of Tennessee erected a monument at the site in eighteen forty-eight, a broken column representing a life cut short. The National Park Service campground here is one of only two on the entire Trace. The site is quiet. It is the kind of place where you can feel the weight of unresolved things.