Meriwether Lewis: suicide or homicide?

[calimac]

Continuing the death theme of my recent posts with one that's 202 years old, in hopes of staving off additional new subjects ...

Recently someone on the MythSoc list made a light humorous post jokingly distinguishing C.S. Lewis from other Lewises, and identified Meriwether Lewis as the Lewis who committed suicide.

Kind of sad that that's what someone should offhand remember him for, mostly because his heroic 1804-6 cross-country expedition with William Clark and their men (and one woman and a baby) was far more worthy of being remembered, but also because it's not at all certain that he did commit suicide. But few people any more know that.

After Lewis's return from the west, President Jefferson appointed him Governor of Louisiana Territory (basically Missouri plus any lands to the north or west nominally under US administration), but he did not have governmental skills and got into a host of administrative troubles and disputes. Heading to Washington with papers to defend his official financial affairs, he stayed one night at a wayfarers' stop on the trail in western Tennessee, and in the middle of the night was mortally shot.

Testimony from witnesses indicated that it was suicide, but holes and inconsistencies in the stories gradually led historians to conclude Lewis was probably murdered, by person(s) unknown. Could have been one of the witnesses, or they were covering up for someone, or the murderer was a random trail robber and the witnesses were just confused. That was the general view at the time I began studying Lewis and Clark, and it was held by both of Lewis's biographers, John Bakeless and Richard Dillon. Both acknowledged that proof was not forthcoming either way, but Bakeless found the suicide story doubtful and Dillon thought it frankly incredible.

Then along came Stephen Ambrose and his Undaunted Courage, the book that launched the bicentenary Lewis and Clark boom. Without providing any new evidence, for absent an exhumation (for which permission has never been granted) there is none to be had, Ambrose not only declared that Lewis committed suicide, he treated the question as firmly settled. Ambrose's evidence, insofar as he had any, was that both Jefferson and Clark immediately reacted to the news by assuming it was suicide, and Jefferson and Clark knew Lewis better than anyone else did, q.e.d.

But, of course, this fact was well-known to earlier scholars, and they did not consider it conclusive, not least because Jefferson and Clark were told it was suicide, and that fact alone can retroactively affect your judgment of a person's life. It certainly affects Ambrose's. To my mind, the strongest disquisitional (as opposed to evidentiary) argument against the suicide theory is the way Ambrose spends his whole book desperately repainting Lewis as an obvious suicide candidate. Taking documentary evidence that really shows nothing more than that Lewis was thoughtful, reflective, and prone to occasional melancholy, Ambrose depicts a pathetic life-long psychological basket case, to the extent that he inadvertently convicts Jefferson of criminal incompetence for appointing such a pathetic loser as commander of the great Western expedition. (Yet, at the same time, Ambrose also credits Lewis as the sole leader, and hence the prime deserver of credit for, the expedition, when in fact Lewis shared command equally and without rancor with Clark. What does Ambrose have against Clark that he ignores and, by omission, belittles the man so? He never says.)

Ambrose's book has, unfortunately, become the default text on the expedition, and few except experts read Bakeless's excellent and Dillon's admirable book any more, despite Ambrose's unabashed earlier praise of their work, Dillon's in particular. Ambrose might have tried to rebut their arguments, but he never addresses them. As far as he's concerned, Jefferson and Clark said it was suicide, and that's the end of the matter. And his position has become the default one. Subsequent biographers of Clark, for instance (a previously unploughed territory for full solo biographies, there's now two of them), have assumed without discussion that Lewis was a suicide.

But if it were that clear, it wouldn't be necessary to rejigger his whole life in terms of its ending to prove it. For, of course, Lewis was not Ambrose's basket case. He was one of Western history's great explorers and a steely, determined, resourceful mountain man. If he hadn't been, he would never have gotten across the continent. You could say that the mountain man didn't know how to handle himself back in civilization, and many writers on Lewis do say that, though others say the evidence that his frustrations as governor made him despairing or suicidal prior to his death are misleading or exaggerated. But if the "mountain man drowning in paperwork" theory is the case, that would make it less, not more, likely to find him in such a condition when he was in his element. (Ambrose argues that being out in the wilderness kept Lewis's paralyzing melancholy barely at bay, but ... come on. If that's what he was like, it would have been insane to risk the expedition on his stability.)

And lastly, no matter how suicidal you are, it doesn't immunize you from being murdered, especially if you're an apparently well-off man traveling through a rough frontier with a lot of baggage.

So now I come across a book called By His Own Hand?: The Mysterious Death of Meriwether Lewis, ed. John D.W. Guice (University of Oklahoma Press, 2006), which actually faces the question head-on. It's an interesting and useful book, and I intend to replace this library copy with my own. Guice writes a chapter presenting the case for homicide, arguing that all the evidence for suicide is retroactive (viewed through eyes looking for evidence of suicidal tendencies), and rehearsing the problems with the witness accounts. He gets other writers to present, just as strongly, the case for suicide and to directly compare the two theories. The "case for suicide" writer, James J. Holmberg, does manage to convince me that suicide was possible, a scenario that Ambrose left me incredulous at. All the writers fairly acknowledge what Ambrose does not, that the evidence available does not permit a confident answer either way.

And that is where it should settle. The one thing some of Guice's contributors say that I do not agree with is that it's the mystery and "glamor" (for want of a better word) around Lewis's death, like the aura around the deaths of Elvis and JFK, that makes him still a memorable character in history. I really don't think so. When I learned about Lewis and Clark, Lewis's death was one of the least interesting, and - it appeared - most uncharacteristic things about him. The things that make Lewis and Clark so fascinating are the intrepid confidence with which he and Clark ventured off into the wilderness, the first whites to go out that way, and something else Ambrose downplays, the unblemished friendly cooperation with which the captains shared command.

Comments

[wordweaverlynn.livejournal.com]

As far as I'm concerned, Stephen Ambrose is a completely unreliable source. The plagiarism scandal was bad enough. The fabricated interviews are clear evidence that he was writing fiction.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

The problems with Ambrose's interpretation of Lewis all worked themselves out in my head long before the scandals associated with his name emerged. I wanted to write without reference to them, because I would prefer to judge the matter purely on the basis of direct evidence, rather than by impeaching him circumstantially.