meriwether lewis commits suicide--8/31/26
Today's selection-- from This Vast Enterprise by Craig Fehrman. Years after his famed Lewis and Clark expedition, Meriwether Lewis committed suicide:
“[Meriwether] Lewis ended up in St. Louis … as governor of the Louisiana territory. He arrived with Seaman and John Pernier, a free, mixed-race man he'd met through Jefferson. (Lewis never did buy an enslaved body servant like York.) He worked closely with [his former partner in exploration William] Clark, dining and briefly living with him and Julia. It would never be like the expedition, but, as Lewis told his friend, ‘I ... still consider myself your messmate.’
“As governor, Lewis struggled with settlers in Louisiana and politicians in Washington. ‘Slander, detraction, and violence stalk through our forests,’ wrote one official, ‘as well as our villages.’ This was a new kind of problem. A scout party could not fix St. Louis.
“Lewis also struggled with his book. He hired a printer and wrote a prospectus in 1807, promising three volumes–his own narrative, a survey of the Native nations, and a final volume just for science–plus Clark's big map, revised with their latitude and longitude data. Given Lewis's literary talents, and given the Corps' global fame, the book seemed destined to become the third great work of American nonfiction, joining Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia and Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography. The president remained ecstatic, pledging to ship early copies around the world to his scholarly friends.
“Months went by without Lewis writing a single word. This was not a poet, blocked on a sonnet. The expedition wasn't finished until the book was. His inability to write threatened everything the Corps had achieved together. Lewis understood this, of course, which must have turned his silence into self-criticism, his difficulty into despair. He'd lost the focused physicality of exploration. Now he lost the forced introspection of writing–the daily nudge to describe his problems and also his solutions.
“The expedition haunted Lewis in more tangible ways. Graveline, carrying guns for Piahito's sons and news of their father's death, finally reached the Arikara on June 3, 1807. They reacted with rage, calling Jefferson a 'liar' and promising, in the words of one witness, to ‘kill.’
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| Portrait by Charles Balthazar Julien Févret de Saint-Mémin, 1805 |
“Later that summer, the Americans tried to return Sheheke and his family to their Mandan town. Sheheke's escort numbered about fifty men, a mix of traders and soldiers led by Pryor, who'd been promoted to ensign after the expedition.
“At the start, the escort traveled with the Partisan and his party, who had recently made their alliance with Clark. They passed through Sicangu territory with no trouble. (The Lakota, one soldier reported, showed ‘a friendly disposition to the citizens of the United States.’) When Pryor and Sheheke reached the Ankara, though, they found more than six hundred angry and well-armed men. A battle followed, with the Arikara shooting at them with American guns loaded with American bullets. Pryor retreated with four dead and eight wounded–and with Sheheke still stuck in St. Louis, 1,600 miles from home.
“It was the latest blow to Lewis and his mind. He tried to parry these blows, and sometimes he succeeded. There were times when he still laughed–when he joked, after a romantic rejection, that ‘I never felt less like a hero than at the present moment.’ There were times when he still wrote–when he drafted an incisive essay on the fur trade, though his book remained untouched.
“But those times became less frequent. The captain began drinking heavily, indulging, in the words of a fellow officer, in ‘the free use he made of liquor, which he acknowledged very candidly to me.’ His finances spiraled. He had speculated on land and owned more than he could use, especially since he showed no interest in buying or even hiring slaves.
“In 1809, Lewis cried to send Sheheke home a second time. The Arikara remained angry, and Lewis fortified the second escort by linking it to a group of private traders, something Dearborn had done with Pryor's attempt. Unfortunately, Madison had replaced Jefferson as president, which meant William Eustis had replaced Dearborn as secretary of war. Eustis refused to cover some of Lewis's expenses for Sheheke, leaving the captain personally responsible. His creditors began to circle, but what bothered Lewis most was that Eustis had questioned his patriotism, his honor.
“Lewis decided to go to Washington to defend himself in person. Before he left, he sat down with Clark to review his finances, line by line. He told Clark at lease part of the truth about the book. Clark wanted to help his friend but didn't know how. ‘If his mind had been at ease,’ Clark wrote, ‘I should have parted cheerfully.’ But his mind was not.
“Lewis headed for Washington, traveling with Seaman and Pernier. He continued to drink. He took opiates, perhaps because he was suffering from malaria; multiple people described him as ‘deranged.’
“As he rode along the Natchez Trace toward Nashville, Lewis began talking out loud to Clark, who was hundreds of miles away. Lewis told his co-captain he could hear him getting close. He told him he always knew he would rescue him.
“On October 11, at a rural inn, Lewis shot himself twice and died. Seaman refused to leave his owner's body. The captain was buried near the Natchez Trace.
“Lewis killed himself because he decided that being alive hurt more than being dead. There was no easy explanation for that hurt–no neat equation of family history plus no Northwest Passage equals depression. (If there was one, Lewis would have solved it.) It was a muddle of addiction and exhaustion and neurochemistry, plus the mounting pressures of his job and his book, plus the unintended consequences of his foreign policy, starting with Piahito.
“No one was shocked by Lewis's act–not Clark, not Jefferson, not Madison, not the soldiers and senators who knew Lewis so well. They were sad, but they were not surprised. When Clark heard the news, he wrote, ‘I fear, O!, I fear the weight of his mind has overcome him.’
“More than a decade later, in 1825, Clark could write something shorter, but not easier.
“In his notebook, he wrote ‘Captain Lewis.’ Then he wrote, ‘dead.”
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