Background and Timeline

Background

• Meriwether Lewis (1774-1809) was 35 years old when he died. In 1807, President Jefferson appointed him Governor of Upper Louisiana Territory, based in St. Louis. William Clark was appointed Indian Agent for the territory. Upper Louisiana extended to the Rocky Mountains and Canadian border—it was the land they had explored in 1804-06.
• Lewis’s first assignment was to remove suspected Burrites from position of power and influence. Aaron Burr had led a filibuster expedition to invade Mexico in late 1806, just as the Lewis and Clark Expedition was returning to St. Louis. Burr’s co-conspirator, General Wilkinson, betrayed him and Burr’s expedition ended in failure. Burr stood trial for treason in 1807, and was acquitted.
• Fraudulent land titles and lead mine leases had been created by General James Wilkinson, the first governor of the territory in 1805-06. Wilkinson was still Commanding General of the U. S. Army.
• As Governor, Lewis personally paid bills for which he expected to be reimbursed by the federal government. One bill was for printing the Territorial Laws of Louisiana; the other was for expenses incurred in returning the Mandan Chief to his home in North Dakota. Federal bureaucrats refused to reimburse him. The bills totalled $2,458.50. His annual salary was $2,000. He had invested heavily in land, and his creditors were eager to force the sale of his land. In September, 1809 Lewis left St. Louis to go to Washington to straighten things out with the federal government.
• Lewis—like almost everyone in Louisiana—suffered from malarial fevers. Malaria was caused by the bite of infected mosquitoes. He was sick before leaving St. Louis, and sick while traveling on the boat down the Mississippi. He was going to New Orleans where he would board a ship to Baltimore.
• Lewis intended to return to St. Louis. His brother was living there and he had bought a farm for their mother. He had signed a five year indenture paper to pay for the education and expenses of the son of the interpreter for the Mandan Chief. The 13 year old boy wanted to remain in St. Louis rather than go back to North Dakota.

Timeline

1809

• SEPTEMBER 4: Lewis left St. Louis, accompanied by his servant, John Pernier, who was of African-American and French descent. Pernier worked in the White House during Jefferson’s administration. Lewis’s dog Seaman was with them.
• SEPTEMBER 11: Lewis stopped at New Madrid, Missouri to rest and recuperate. While he was there, he made out a will dated September 11th, leaving everything to his mother after his debts were paid.
• SEPTEMBER 15: Lewis arrived at Fort Pickering on the Chickasaw Bluffs overlooking the Mississippi River (today’s Memphis, Tennessee). The commander of the fort, Captain Gilbert C. Russell, nursed him back to health, and later wrote to Jefferson that in “in about six days he was perfectly restored to health and able to travel.”
• SEPTEMBER 16: Lewis wrote President Madison that he had changed his travel plans. Instead of going by ship to Baltimore, he was going overland on the Natchez Trace to Nashville and continue east from there. He wrote that his reasons were wanting to avoid the climate of New Orleans, and fear of his papers falling into the hands of the British whose ships were in Gulf Coast waters.
• SEPTEMBER 18-22 (?): Indian Agent James Neelly arrived at Fort Pickering a few days after Lewis arrived, and stayed there until Neelly left the fort with Lewis.
• SEPTEMBER 22-28: Captain Russell, the fort commander, wanted to go to Washington because he also had reimbursement problems. After he was restored to health, Lewis waited 6-8 days expecting Russell would get permission to travel with him, but in this, they “were disappointed.” Russell must have written to General Wilkinson in New Orleans requesting permission to travel before Lewis arrived. Communication would have taken 4-5 weeks between the fort and New Orleans.
• SEPTEMBER 20 (?): Sometime around September 20th, Major Amos Stoddard met a man who told him that he had several times prevented Meriwether Lewis from committing suicide at the fort. Major Stoddard was traveling on the Natchez Trace from Fort Adams, near Natchez, to Nashville.
• SEPTEMBER 27: Stoddard arrived in Nashville and told Captain James House the story of the suicide attempts.
• SEPTEMBER 28: Captain House wrote to Frederick Bates in St. Louis telling him the story of the suicide attempts.
• SEPTEMBER 28: Lewis arranged for a trunk belonging to Captain House to be taken to New Orleans by Benjamin Wilkinson, the general’s nephew and a St. Louis merchant. Lewis had agreed to be responsible for House’s trunk. Captain House was traveling to Baltimore by land. Wilkinson must have left St. Louis with Lewis on the same boat. Wilkinson died of an unknown cause, while on board the ship bound for Baltimore.
• SEPTEMBER 29: Lewis and Pernier departed from the fort with the Indian Agent James Neelly, who volunteered to escort Lewis to Nashville. They were accompanied by a man provided by Captain Russell to haul Lewis’s two trunks to the Chickasaw Indian Agency. The trunks contained all the papers and journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition and other documents Lewis was bringing to Washington.
• SEPTEMBER 29: Lewis left behind two trunks, a case, and other belongings at the fort. He signed a memo stating that—if he notified Russell in writing—they were to be sent to him in Nashville. Otherwise they were to be returned to St. Louis. Russell was to be “particular as to whom he confides these trunks, etc.” They could be “safely confided” in the care of J. P. Cabanné, who was expected to come up river within the month. Cabanné was a wealthy St. Louis businessman.
• SEPTEMBER 29-OCTOBER 2: Lewis, Agent Neelly, Pernier and Russell’s man traveled about 100 miles southeast to the Chickasaw Indian Agency located on the Natchez Trace near Pontotoc, Mississippi.
• OCTOBER (?): Some days after Lewis left the fort, a man came to Fort Pickering and told Captain Russell that Lewis had told him to tell Russell to keep trunks at the fort until he heard from Lewis again.
• OCTOBER 3: At the Indian Agency, Neelly wrote out a deposition regarding a thief who had stolen saddle bags and money. The deposition was witnessed by eight men.
• OCTOBER 4: Russell’s man started back to Fort Pickering and Neelly’s man was now hauling Lewis’s two trunks. They began traveling north on the Trace towards Nashville.
• OCTOBER 6: They crossed the Tennessee River on a ferry owned by George Colbert.
• OCTOBER 7: Neelly supposedly stayed behind looking for “two lost horses” on the Trace, and told the others to go on ahead. New evidence proves this story is false. However, Neelly did leave the group, because he needed to take another route to reach Franklin, Tennessee by October 11th. He was scheduled to appear in court on that day.
• OCTOBER 10: Lewis, Pernier, and Neelly’s man arrived at Grinder’s Stand. Neelly had told Lewis to wait for him at the first house he came to that was inhabited by white people. This was Grinder’s Stand (a tavern inn) on the edge of Chickasaw Indian territory. Mrs. Grinder eventually told three different stories about what happened that night.
• OCTOBER 11: Sometime during the early morning hours Lewis died of gunshot wounds.
• OCTOBER 11: Neelly appeared in court in Franklin. He was being sued for a debt, which he was ordered to pay.
• OCTOBER 13: Neelly arrived at Grinder’s Stand on his way back to the Indian Agency near Pontotoc. Lewis may have been buried at Grinder’s Stand on this day.
• OCTOBER 13 (?): A coroner’s jury viewed the body. Local tradition names the members of the jury and its foreman. The records of the inquest are missing. Local tradition says the jury believed Robert Grinder and his nephew killed Lewis, but they were afraid to convict him.
• OCTOBER 18: At the Indian Agency, Neelly wrote a letter asking to be reimbursed $90 by the War Department. He had paid $90 to Jeremiah K. Love to take a prisoner to Nashville to stand trial for stealing the money and saddlebags.
• OCTOBER 18: In Nashville, Captain John Brahan wrote four letters telling the story of Lewis’s death by suicide. One letter is the primary evidence on which the suicide story is based, because it was supposedly written by James Neelly to President Jefferson. Brahan wrote it and signed Neelly’s name. The other three letters, signed by Brahan, went to President Jefferson, Secretary of War William Eustis, and Major Amos Stoddard.
• OCTOBER 19: Brahan’s letter to Stoddard says that Lewis’s “servant John Parney” will go early in the morning to President Jefferson with Major Neelly’s letter.
• OCTOBER 20: The story of Lewis’s death by suicide appeared in the Nashville Democratic Clarion newspaper, and Neelly’s deposition appeared in the newspaper in the form of an advertisement. The ad said it would also be placed in Natchez and New Orleans newspapers.
• NOVEMBER 26: William Clark was visiting his in-laws in Fincastle, Virginia while en route to Washington. He already knew Lewis had died. Clark wrote to his brother he had just received letters from Captain Russell stating that: Lewis tried to kill himself before reaching the fort; Lewis was in a state of mental derangement for 15 days at the fort; and Lewis wrote a second will while at the fort. These letters are forgeries written in the name of Russell. They have never been found.
• DECEMBER 7: William Clark spent the night at Monticello as a guest of President Jefferson where they talked about the “affairs of Gov. Lewis &c &c &c [etcetra, etcetra, etcetra].”
• JANUARY 4, 1810: Captain Russell wrote to Jefferson with a full report of Lewis’s arrival, stay, and departure from the fort; the $220 Lewis had on him when he left the fort; the loans Russell made to him; the contents of the two trunks Lewis was bringing to Washington; and his general equipment, which was “all ellegant.” He reported Lewis left two trunks at the fort, and enclosed Lewis’s memo regarding the trunks.
• JANUARY 31, 1810: Russell wrote again to Jefferson. He had learned Neelly took Lewis’s pistols and other equipment as security for money Neelly said he had loaned to Lewis. Neelly also claimed that he was owed compensation for the use of his man and a horse. Russell told Jefferson that Neelly had no money when he left the fort, so he couldn’t have “loaned” Lewis any money. Russell had authorized someone to pay the “pretended claim” and get Lewis’s pistols back from Neelly.
• MAY 5, 1810: John Suverman, an old, blind former servant at Jefferson’s White House had someone write a letter for him. The letter reported that John Pernier died on April 29th of an overdose of laudenam (a mixture of opium and alcohol). Pernier was living with Suverman while waiting to receive $271.50 in back pay owed to him by the Lewis estate.
• MAY 6, 1810: Meriwether Lewis’s friend, Alexander Wilson, stopped at Grinder’s Stand. He was traveling on the Natchez Trace looking for new bird specimens to draw for his multi-volume work, American Ornithology. Wilson provided the second version of Mrs. Grinder’s story in a long letter to a friend. He wrote that Lewis was buried at Grinder’s Stand near the common path, with a few fence rails thrown over his grave. Wilson gave Robert Grinder money to put up a fence to protect the grave from the hogs.
• NOVEMBER 26, 1811: General James Wilkins was standing trial at a military court martial in Frederick Town, Maryland. He used the services of his confidential scribe to prepare a false document called the “Russell Statement.” The Russell Statement is in the form of a deposition, but was neither written nor signed by Gilbert C. Russell. It is often cited as a primary document along with the Neelly letter written by Brahan. It relates the story of attempted suicides prior to Lewis’s death.
• JANUARY 12, 1812: John Marks, Lewis’s stepbrother, wrote to Reuben Lewis, Lewis’s brother, that he had visited the Neelly farm near Franklin in an attempt to retrieve Lewis’s property. Mrs. Neelly gave him Lewis’s horse and rifle, but he was told that Neelly “carries the dirk [knife] and Pistols constantly with him.” Neelly was at the Indian Agency.
• AUGUST 18, 1813: On the date of Lewis’s birthday, Jefferson wrote a long account of Meriwether Lewis’s life which served as an introduction to the first edition of the Lewis and Clark Journals.
• 1814: Reverend Timothy Alden published A Collection of American Epitaphs and Inscriptions with Occasional Notes. It contained the inscription on Seaman’s collar, which was on exhibit in an Alexandria museum, and noted that Seaman died of grief on Lewis’s grave.
• FEBRUARY 1, 1845: The New York Dispatch newspaper printed an account of the third version of the Mrs. Grinder story, told by a schoolteacher who interviewed her.
• 1850: When the State of Tennesee erected a monument over Lewis’s grave at Grinder’s Stand, the Monument Committee wrote in the official report that although it was commonly believed Governor Lewis died by his own hand, “It seems to be more probable that he died by the hands of an assassin.”
• AUGUST 18, 1925: Dedication services were held at the gravesite establishing it as a National Monument. Between 7,000-10,000 people attended the event.
• JUNE 3-4, 1996: An official Coroner’s Inquest was held at Hohenwald, Lewis County, Tennessee to investigate the death of Meriwether Lewis. The jury requested an exhumation take place to determine the cause of death.
• JANUARY 11, 2008: The Department of Interior approved the request of 200 members of the Lewis family to exhume Lewis’s remains to determine the cause of his death, and the permit process was started.
• OCTOBER 7, 2009: Ceremonies were held at the National Monument & Gravesite attended by over 2,000 people, commemorating the 200th anniversary of Lewis’s death.
• APRIL 2, 2010: The Department of Interior reversed itself and turned down the family’s request for exhumation, stopping the permit process.