Meriwether Lewis’s Grave: A guide to his mysterious death
Meriwether Lewis is a name nearly everyone recognizes. He is the Lewis in Lewis and Clark, the duo who led the Corps of Discovery to the Pacific Ocean and back. For his famous adventure, he is romanticized as an American hero in history. But what is less romantic and much less known is how he met his maker.
Meriwether Lewis died on October 11, 1809, at Grinder’s Stand, a small inn along the Natchez Trace in Tennessee, about 75 miles southwest of Nashville. Lewis was only 35 years old and barely three years removed from his remarkable expedition across the nation.
How did Meriwether Lewis die?
His life was cut short, and his death has been shrouded in speculation and mystery for more than 200 years. Here is what we know: In 1809, he was living in St. Louis and serving as the Governor of the Upper Louisiana Territory, a position he was not fond of.
On September 4, 1809, he departed St. Louis for Washington D.C., where he intended to protest the government’s denial of his reimbursement request for expenses as well as his territorial governor assignment.
Did Meriwether Lewis Commit Suicide?
This was significant for Lewis, as he was deeply in debt and bankrupt. He could not get his journals published, and as unhappy, he was still unmarried. His life was not what he thought it should be.
It’s being broke, unlucky with love, generally depressed, and possibly struggling with alcohol and opium that support the first and mostly accepted theory of Meriwether Lewis’s death, he committed suicide.
His close friends Thomas Jefferson and William Clark accepted this. Jefferson had this to say.
“Governor Lewis had from early life been subject to hypocondriac [sic] affections. It was a constitutional disposition in all the nearer branches of the family of his name, it was more immediately inherited by him from his father…While he lived with me in Washington, I observed at times sensible depressions of mind, but knowing their constitutional source, I estimated their course by what I had seen in the family.”
Clark would write, “I fear the weight of his mind has overcome him,” after learning of Lewis’s death.
Was Meriwether Lewis Murdered?
Another theory is that Lewis was murdered. Some historians have argued that Lewis would not have been depressed. He was an American hero who would have been basking in the fame of leading the expedition to the Pacific, which had catapulted him to a celebrity and household name. Proponents of this theory argue that the Natchez Trace was a very dangerous place in the early 1800’s. Criminals roamed the road looking to rob unsuspecting travelers. It’s possible bandits killed him.
Lewis’s family believed he was murdered by John Pernier, who was his free African American personal servant. After the death, Pernier visited Lewis’s family in Virginia, where it is believed he informed them of the suicide and tried to collect back wages owed to him from Lewis. The explanation was not accepted and the family immediately began to suspect Pernier of murder.
Another theory is that Robert Grinder, the owner of Grinder’s Stand, came home the night of October 11, 1809, to find Meriwether Lewis in bed with his wife and shot him.
The last explanation is that Lewis was driven mad by syphilis or malaria, which led him to take his own life. In its later stages, malaria is known to cause dementia and erratic behavior.
What happened to Meriwether Lewis may be lost to history and never fully known or understood.
Visiting Meriwether Lewis’s Grave
Meriwether Lewis was buried a few hundred yards from where he died at Grinder’s Stand. He remains there today, at milepost 285.9 along the Natchez Trace Parkway.
My wife and I visited the site during a mid-winter road trip. We arrived in the afternoon. As we pulled in, the parking lot was nearly empty. To be expected, it was the middle of the week, and it was windy and pretty cold.
A monument placed there in 1848 marks Lewis’s burial site. At first glance, it looks like the monument is in some disrepair. The shaft is broken off. Upon closer inspection, we learned that the broken shaft was done deliberately. The broken shaft signifies a life cut short by a premature death, which was a common custom in the 1800s.
After checking out the grave, we explored the area a bit. We walked by the site of Grinder’s Stand. The buildings were long gone, but reading the exhibits and seeing where they stood was still interesting.
Hiking the Original Natchez Trace
Next, we walked a portion of the original Natchez Trace. Meriwether Lewis himself and thousands of others would have used this portion of the trail.
The trail was well-worn, just as it had been for hundreds of years. It is easily distinguished despite being covered with a thick layer of leaves from the previous fall. We walked a while before turning back, satisfied we had followed in Lewis’s footsteps.
Other Things to Do Along the Natchez Trace
Confederate Gravesites
Sunken Trace
Emerald Mound
Other Lewis and Clark Sites
