Murder or Suicide?

"I found by several experiments that a table spoon full of water exposed to the air in a saucer would evaporate in 36 hours when the mercury did not stand higher than the temperate point at the greatest heat of the day ..."

And this description of the Great Falls of the Missouri reveals the mind of a poet:

"...irregular and somewhat projecting rocks below receives the water in it's passage down and brakes it into a perfect white foam which assumes a thousand forms in a moment sometimes flying up in jets of sparkling foam... "

And so it goes, scientist, poet, adventurer, renaissance man gushing forth in a creative stream that would mysteriously fall silent for weeks at a time. Those strange silences would later speak volumes, but the eventual success of the mission all but drowned out any signs of trouble ahead.

Lewis and his men arrived back to heroes' welcomes, and Lewis himself became the toast of the town in Washington DC and Philadelphia. But signs of strange behavior were creeping in. He unaccountably kept putting off the publication of his journals, and drug abuse and deep depressions helped undermine his post as Governor of the Louisiana Territory.

Still, there was no denying his hero status, and soon he would be returning once more to the open arms of his friends and admirers back east. But he never made it back. His mentor Thomas Jefferson was greatly saddened but not at all surprised:

"Governor Lewis," he wrote, "had, from early life, been subject to hypochondriac 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."

There was no question in Jefferson's mind: "About three o'clock in the night," he wrote, "he did the deed ..."

But many historians have since taken issue:

"It seems impossible," one wrote, "that a young man of 35 ... on his way .. to the capital 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."

Wrote another: "The Meriwether Lewis they knew did not lose his courage nor his head in times of trial." And still another: "By temperament, he was a fighter, not a quitter."

But the plain facts tell another story, even if no one actually saw Lewis put the

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