Completing a year following the Lewis and Clark Trail, Clay visits the lonely gravesite where the 35-year-old Meriwether Lewis is buried.
The last stop on my 2025 national Lewis and Clark tour was a quiet and lonely gravesite west of Nashville. Meriwether Lewis was just 35 years old when he took his own life at a squalid inn on the Natchez Trace, about 80 miles from Nashville. He was on his way to Washington, DC, and probably Monticello. He was terribly distraught — barely hanging on, on the edge of mental and toxic collapse. The governor was under an official cloud. He probably reckoned it was more serious than it was, but it was plenty serious. The War Department was refusing to honor vouchers he had used to pay for public expenditures in Upper Louisiana. His own finances were broken. He seems to have felt he was in danger of being recalled by the Madison administration.
He was buried on this site 216 years ago, almost to the day. I was there on October 8, 2025; he died on October 11, 1809. It was a gray, gloomy day with the temperature no higher than 70 degrees. Lewis’ monument consists of a double pedestal topped with a 62-foot-high broken concrete shaft. It’s not clear whether there was any burial service, but the sense we get is that he was simply lowered into a grave without ceremony of any kind. He was not entirely alone at the time of his death. The inn’s proprietor, Priscilla Grinder, was only a few yards away with her children. The Grinders owned a few slaves. Lewis’ free Black servant Pernier was there, too, but not with the governor.
When Clark died in St. Louis in 1838, 20,000 people marched in the funeral parade.
I’ve now spent forty years off and on trying to make sense of Lewis’ suicide. It’s clear that his life came apart during the three years that followed his successful return to St. Louis on September 23, 1806, after 28 months in the remote wilderness, all the way to the Pacific Ocean and back.
Suicide is a deeply saddening mystery. Life is so precious and so brief — not even a nanosecond in geological time — that most people try to squeeze a little more time out of it even when they are terminally ill. The conventional wisdom is that if you can just get through the long night of the soul — whenever it comes, whatever it consists of — you can probably find a way to go on. When our lives reach a crisis point and it seems like there is no use going on (I’ve been there), some fundamental resilience usually gets us through. Still, in a small number of instances, the suffering individual chooses to give up the struggle. Lewis did not leave a suicide note. Even when people do, they seldom tell the whole story. Suicide has a destabilizing effect on those who survive, especially for those who knew the deceased, but often for a much wider community. In fact, you could argue that Lewis’ suicide has destabilized Lewis and Clark studies for the last forty years. Most people accept that it was suicide, not murder, but no matter what it was, Lewis’ early death casts a shadow over America’s first great road story.
I can understand, I think, why Jeffrey Epstein would hang himself — he was not a private individual in Indiana, but a household name, plausibly accused of crimes of such universal condemnation that he would be fortunate to survive a long prison term. It’s harder to understand why Robin Williams would kill himself, or Anthony Bourdain, or Ernest Hemingway, who won not only the Pulitzer Prize but the Nobel Prize for Literature. Mystery. The shame, even for someone as seemingly shameless as Epstein, must have been beyond excruciating, and Meriwether Lewis surely felt shame, repudiated by the government of the United States with President Madison’s explicit approval, bankrupted in the eyes of the 1,000 people of St. Louis.
Unless Lewis was somehow caught up in the border conspiracies — some combination of Aaron Burr’s treasonous attempts to carve off part of the West for his own advantage or James Wilkinson’s machinations as a double agent in the employ of Spain at the same time he was America’s chief military officer in the West — the worst that can be said of Lewis is that he hadn’t written his book; his governorship was vexed; that as governor he had spent moneys (some considerable) not authorized by Congress or the War Department; and that he was maddeningly silent when it mattered. This alone should not have taken him over the line. Still, because Lewis was also ill — from malaria, alcohol poisoning, and probably opioids in the form of laudanum — he apparently did not have enough mental stamina to soldier through the crisis. He saw it somehow as an existential crisis.
Meriwether Lewis led one of the most successful exploration missions in history and brought all but one of his men back alive (and the one died of natural causes). He had made important discoveries. He was the first white person to describe 122 animal species, including the pronghorn antelope, the bighorn sheep, the mule deer, the black-tailed prairie dog, and the grizzly bear; and 178 plant species. When the switch was on, he was unquestionably the most interesting writer of all the journal keepers, including his good friend William Clark. He had finessed his way through several serious crises along the trail. Through brilliant planning and the recruitment of an outstanding crew, he had accomplished everything Jefferson had asked him to accomplish.
All of that was clouded in August, September, and early October 1809.
We don’t know why Lewis killed himself. We don’t 100% know that he did, though the evidence seems clear enough. What we do know is that his life was snuffed out when he was a very young man. We know, too, that he died before the work of the Lewis and Clark expedition was finished. Lewis never published even volume one of his projected three-volume report on the great journey. Embedded in what passes as the journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition are some remarkable fragments of what he would have written had he managed to survive and persevere. Those book-ready passages are easily discernible in the mass of unpolished journals, but they are not more than tantalizing fragments. We are forced to reconstruct the journey and construct a master narrative out of second-rate materials. No fair-minded person believes that Clark’s more steady journal work is a fully satisfying substitution for what Lewis would have written had he lived. Clark’s pragmatic, unpretentious, straightforward journal entries are prosaic. How often does one find a passage in Clark that captures the sense of wonder and the sense of discovery that make the Lewis and Clark story magical?
I have no desire to judge Lewis for taking his life. We weren’t there. We surely don’t know the whole story. Try as we might, we cannot get into his mind. We have only a limited understanding of his demons. Long ago, when I was a student at Oxford University, I read extensively about suicide because my poet John Donne announced, “I haue often such a sickly inclination. And . . . whensoeuer my affliction assayles me, me thinks I haue the keyes of my prison in myne owne hand, and no remedy presents it selfe so soone to my heart, as mine owne sword” [sic throughout]. And in 1608 Donne wrote the first sustained defense of suicide in Western civilization. In doing so, he attempted to refute or at least destabilize St. Augustine’s definitive Christian condemnation of suicide in the massively influential City of God (ca. 425 CE). Donne’s view in Biathanatos was that our duty is charity, not judgment.
I don’t judge Lewis for taking his life, but I do judge him for leaving us in the lurch. He owed it to Jefferson, to the United States, to the learned world, to the Enlightenment, to write up his findings. We can see in the fragments he left us (leaving Fort Mandan on April 7, 1805; first sighting the Rocky Mountains on May 26, 1805; bestriding the source creek of the “mighty and heretofore deemed endless Missouri” River [August 12, 1805]), what he would have produced had he persevered. His book would have immediately been deemed a masterpiece of exploration literature. His reputation would be dramatically better than it is, though it is already quite high, and he would be regarded as the near-equal of John James Audubon in the annals of natural science.
I sat for a long time alone at the grave.
I thought about Lewis’ last desperate night. We don’t know everything we want to know about just what unfolded as he approached Grinder’s Stand, took his quarters, picked at his dinner, drank a little whiskey, mumbled his deep frustrations, and soaked in his deeply hurt pride. The gist of what he seems to have been saying that night, if Priscilla Grinder is a reliable source, is that it would be better to take his own life than to let his enemies — by which he seems chiefly to have meant the bureaucrats of James Madison’s War Department — do it for him. A virulent streak of malaria, the kind of bitterness that actually embitters, intoxication or perhaps delirium tremens, perhaps the opioid poisoning of laudanum, a cosmic sense of aloneness. The only people who might have helped him make it through the night were absent: Clark, his mother Lucy, perhaps his emotionally detached mentor Jefferson, his other best friend Mahlon Dickerson (back in Philadelphia), and his Newfoundland dog Seaman. Lewis knew he was on a collision course with Jefferson at Monticello (where’s the book?) and Madison’s bureaucrats (vouchers denied, perhaps a formal recall, certainly a stern rebuke). He died of a gunshot wound to the head and another to the abdomen.
As I sat musing all these things, a few people wandered over to the grave shaft from the loop road: several on motorcycles, a couple of families, a few older couples who were killing time while waiting for a giant street fair flea market a few miles away, but not open for business until tomorrow. Incognito, I asked each cluster why they were there and what they knew about Lewis and Clark. Several individuals assured me that it had to be murder because how does Captain Meriwether Lewis shoot himself in the head and not die? But nobody was in an argumentative mood. I certainly wasn’t, and I was glad to listen to this little self-selected slice of America.
At some point, I had to walk back to my car and drive to Birmingham, where I had a dinner engagement. I was sorry to leave. I’m sad to leave this remarkable year of travel and adventure, of hard reading and good conversations, behind. I’m sorry it ended this way for Lewis, who had so many talents and such an amazing sense of mission and purpose.
If it is at least possible that Lewis was murdered on October 11, 1809, this much seems certain to me: he was in a suicidal state, and there was nobody there to help him make it through the night.