Murder or Suicide?
© John McManamy
Two pistol shots rang out in the wilderness night. From out in the dark a man staggered and fell against a stump then crawled to his lodgings. At daybreak, the woman of the house summoned up the courage to enter the man's room. A piece of her lodger's forehead had been blown off, exposing his brains. He begged the woman or one of her servants to take his rifle and finish the deed, offering all his money in his trunk as a reward.
Another account reports that the lodger was found by one of the servants, busily engaged in cutting himself from head to foot. Minutes later, one of America's great heroes - a true hero in an age of heroes - would be dead. Captain Meriwether Lewis, protégé of Thomas Jefferson, leader of the Lewis and Clark expedition, and Governor of the vast Louisiana Territory was all of 35.
In his book, "Undaunted Courage", historian Stephen Ambrose sets out a compelling narrative of the extraordinary leadership displayed by Meriwether Lewis in taking a small band of men on a spectacular journey of discovery through 8,000 miles of untracked wilderness, much of it occupied by hostile Indians.
Over the course of two years Lewis was required to be all things to all men - part frontiersman, part soldier, part medic, part naturalist, part geographer, part journalist, part diplomat. He was handpicked for the job by none other than his mentor Thomas Jefferson, the ultimate renaissance man. Imagine, sitting at the same dinner table with perhaps the most fascinating man of the millennium. Meriwether Lewis did, every evening for two years.
Soon, the ambiance would be far different:
"Our vessels consisted of six small canoes, and two large perogues," he wrote in his journals. "This little fleet altho' not quite so rispectable as those of Columbus or Capt. Cook, were still viewed by us with as much pleasure as those deservedly famed adventurers ever beheld theirs; and I dare say with quite as much anxiety for their safety and preservation. we were now about to penetrate a country at least two thousand miles in width, on which the foot of civilized man had never trodden; the good or evil it had in store for us was for experiment yet to determine, and these little vessells contained every article by which we were to expect to subsist or defend ourselves."
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