Aftermath
Unlike a cold or the flu, syphilis is a gift that keeps on giving. The one-third of infected people who proceed on to develop tertiary (third-stage) syphilis carry a terrible burden. No one knows why two-thirds of syphilitics escape the curse of the tertiary manifestations; it is only certain that they are the fortunate ones. Here are some of the unlucky one-third. The brilliant French writer Guy de Maupassant died a raving madman in 1893, a victim of cerebral tertiary syphilis. 1 Winston Churchill’s father, Lord Randolph, a brilliant orator and politician, died in 1895, reduced to a shambling and incoherent wreck by tertiary syphilis, although other authorities say he was felled by small strokes or perhaps by a brain tumor. Scott Joplin, the King of Ragtime and one of America’s most talented composers, went the same way in 1917. England’s Henry VIII died of either syphilis or diabetes. Many famous people may have been victims of late syphilis: Friedrich Nietzsche, Heinrich Heine, Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, and Al Capone. Karen Blixen, the author of Out of Africa , was infected by her husband and, in spite of treatment with Salvarsan, went on to develop tabes dorsalis. 2 Surgeon Warren Webster, who had served at Fort Larned, Kansas, just before the Civil War, described the inroads of syphilis upon the Kiowas and Arapahos: “They are victims of the most desperate forms of constitutional syphilis, evidencing itself in lost noses, vacant palates and the vilest cutaneous affectations.” 3
In the spring of 1805, Lewis and Clark sent a delegation of Indian chiefs to Washington DC in order to impress them with American power. As the chiefs were preparing to return west in February 1807, the famed painter and student of natural history Charles Wilson Peale wrote to his friend Thomas Jefferson: “In conversation with a friend this morning as the Indians were leaving this City [Philadelphia], he said they were sadly diseased; they had been with the women of bad fame in the lower part of the town and contracted the venerial [sic] disease. I have had no opportunity to enquire for the facts of this report, however I think it my duty to give you this notice, with the Idea that you will give orders for their cure before their departure.” 4
What about the members of the Corps of Discovery? As we have seen, the records suggest that nearly all of them had syphilis and/or gonorrhea at some time during the journey. Three men with venereal disease were identified by name: George Gibson, Silas Goodrich, and Hugh McNeal. The rest are a matter of informed conjecture.
The histories of Lewis and Clark themselves, in the years after their return, have been well documented and will be discussed later. There have been several attempts to record what became of the enlisted and hired men (and one woman), those less-celebrated explorers who were so vital to the expedition’s success. The task of the detective of syphilis is made more difficult by two factors: poor records in years gone by and the difficulty in precise diagnosis before the introduction of reliable blood tests. Almost any diagnosis before 1910 is open to question, especially since syphilis can manifest itself in so many ways. The time of onset adds further confusion into the search: the first manifestations of tertiary syphilis may come in two years—or in twenty. With these limitations in mind, let us proceed on, commencing with the three named men who had the pox. 5
Pvt. George Gibson, hunter, horseman, violinist, and Indian sign interpreter, married after the expedition and died in St. Louis in 1809. The cause of death is unknown. Pvt. Silas Goodrich, a Massachusetts native, was the best fisherman of the Corps. At the end of the expedition Lewis made no special remarks about either Goodrich or Gibson. Goodrich reenlisted in the army around 1807. Clark noted his death as occurring shortly after 1825. The cause of death is unknown.
Pvt. Hugh McNeal, a native of Pennsylvania, was still on the army muster rolls as of September 1811. Clark cites his death as occurring after 1825. The cause of his death is also unknown. It is immediately apparent that answers will be difficult to find, since there is not a single clue regarding tertiary syphilis in the few records that describe the three men positively identified as infected with syphilis.
Let us consider the sergeants. Patrick Gass had served as a Ranger before joining the army in 1799. His carpentry skills benefited the expedition to the Pacific Ocean. He was discharged during the War of 1812 after losing an eye. He married at age sixty and died at age ninety-nine. If he had syphilis, it surely did not impair him. Charles Floyd died on August 20, 1804, before the expedition even reached the Mandan villages. The probable cause was appendicitis. 6 John Ordway was another diarist. He was born around 1775 in New Hampshire. He was considered experienced and reliable, being a regular army man. After settling in Missouri in 1809 he became prosperous, married, and died by around 1817, at age forty-two. Once again, we do not know what killed him. Nathaniel H. Pryor was a married man when he joined the expedition. The captains described him as “a man of character and ability” and recommended him for an officer’s commission. He resigned his commission in 1810, worked three years in the Indian trade, and returned to the army in time to serve in 1814 as a captain at the Battle of New Orleans. Later, he resigned again, became a trader with the Osage, married an Osage woman, and stayed with the tribe until his death in 1831 at the age of fifty-nine. Two towns, a mountain range, and a creek bear his name. There is nothing in the record to suggest disease or debility.
This brings us to the privates. John Boley, who served in two of Zebulon M. Pike’s expeditions after returning with the Corps of Discovery, last appears in the records living with his wife near St. Louis in 18 23. William E. Bratton was sick with a back ailment during much of the expedition; it sounds more orthopedic than bacterial. He was cured by an Indian sweat bath. He served in the War of 1812, married in 1819, and died in Indiana in 1841 at the age of sixty-three. John Collins must have had redeeming qualities, for the captains kept him on in spite of a court-martial and being labeled as a “black gard.” He was killed in 1823 in William Ashley’s battle with the Arikaras. His age and medical history are unknown. John Colter, whose name lives on at Colter Bay in Grand Tetons National Park, explored on his own after the expedition. His descriptions of the Yellowstone volcanic activity caused many to brand him a liar. He settled in Missouri around 1811, married, and died of “jaundice” in 1813. He was probably thirty-eight.
Peter Cruzatte, half French and half Omaha Indian, was a renowned boatman, musician, and interpreter, in spite of being badly nearsighted in an age when corrective lenses were not widely available. He received no special commendation from Lewis, perhaps because he had shot the captain in the buttocks, mistaking him for a bear. In Clark’s later compilation he listed Cruzatte as killed around 1825. There is no medical history. John Dame joined the army in 1801 and was assigned to the expedition from Capt. Amos Stoddard’s artillery. Dame appears only once in the journals: he shot a pelican. Nothing is known of his life after 1805. George Drouillard, a civilian rather than an enlisted man, was half French-Canadian and half Shawnee. A skilled hunter, interpreter, and woodsman, he was valued highly by the two captains, Lewis calling him “A man of much merit” who “deserves the highest commendation” and who “uniformly acquitted himselfwith honor.” In 1810 he was a fur trader at the Three Forks of the Missouri, where he was killed by Blackfeet. We know nothing of his health.
Joseph Field and his brother Reuben were born around 1772 and joined the expedition in August 1803. They were among the best hunters of the expedition, crucial skills when it came to feeding thirty men who could carry little food of their own. Lewis wrote that the brothers fulfilled their duties “with much honor.” Joseph was listedas “killed” a year after the expedition returned. Reubensettled in Kentucky, where he married. He was dead by early 1823. Again, no clear causes of death are recorded. Robert Frazer kept a journal, but it has been lost. Also lost are any personal records, other than a note that he died in Franklin County, Missouri, in 1837. Hugh Hall was a member of the Second Infantry Regiment when he joined the expedition in 1803. He was court-martialed once for getting drunk. In 1809 he borrowed money from Lewis at St. Louis. After that, Hall disappears from the records.
Thomas P. Howard had also been a member of the Second Infantry. He was court-martialed once, for showing the Indians the vulnerability of Fort Mandan’s walls. He, too, is absent from the postexpedition records. François Labiche spoke French and English and several Indian languages; he was also a skilled trader and boatman. On the return to St. Louis he was recommended for a bonus, something quite unusual. He was still alive in St. Louis in 1828. John Newman (1785–1838) was court-martialed and expelled from the party for “expressions of a highly criminal and mutinous nature.” Because of attempts to redeem himself, Lewis later recommended Newman for some back pay and a land warrant. He was killed by the Yankton Sioux in 1838. He had married once, but there is no record of children. German-born John Potts was by trade a miller. There is little note of him in the journals. He was killed by Blackfeet while trapping at the Three Forks of the Missouri in 1808. This strenuous occupation suggests that he was still in good health.
Moses Reed was convicted of desertion in August 1804 and given a dishonorable discharge. The following spring he came downriver with the return party and disappeared from the historical record. John Robertson had been a corporal, but he lost his stripes in some unrecorded manner. There is no mention of him after 1804. George Shannon (1785–1836) was lost once and nearly starved. In 1807, in the failed attempt to return Chief Sheheke to the Mandans, Shannon lost his leg to the Arikaras. After that, fortune smiled on him. He received a pension. He assisted Nicholas Biddle in preparing the printed journals. He studied law and eventually served in the Missouri state senate. His medical condition in later life is unknown. John Shields (1769–1809) had been married thirteen years when he joined the expedition. His skills as a blacksmith at Fort Mandan enabled the expedition to trade metal-working services for food and may have kept the entire Corps from starvation. Lewis recommended him for a bonus. Shields died in Indiana three years after his return from the Pacific coast, again of causes unknown.
John B. Thompson left little trace in the records. Clark called him “a valuable member of our party.” He was “killed” sometime before 1828. Ebenezer Tuttle was born in 1773 and was recruited from Captain Stoddard’s artillery company. Other than that, his life is an unknown. Corporal Richard Warfington came from the Second Infantry. He was considered very reliable and commanded the return party that brought back the first nature specimens to Thomas Jefferson in the summer of 1805. Perhaps his greatest success was delivering a prairie dog and four magpies to Jefferson—still alive! After that, Warfington disappears from the records. Peter Weiser appears but little in the journals. He was probably killed around 1810 by Indians. He would have been around thirty years of age.
William Werner left even fewer tracks than Peter Weiser. Werner was absent without leave once as the voyage began, and in 1807 was advanced some money by Lewis and given the use of a government horse. There are no other data. Isaac White joined Captain Stoddard’s artillery company in 1801; otherwise there is no record of him after 1804. Joseph Whitehouse kept a journal of the expedition and often served as a tailor. He otherwise is invisible until 1807, when he was arrested for debt. He later rejoined the army and fought in the War of 1812. He deserted in 1817, when he was forty-two, and vanished. Hamilton Willard received one hundred lashes for sleeping on sentry duty; he was an unlucky man, being the only soldier to lose his horse twice. After the expedition he was hired as a government blacksmith for four different Indian tribes. He married in 1807 and sired twelve children. He died in Sacramento, California, in 1865 at the age of eighty-seven. Richard Windsor was one of the expedition’s better hunters; he later served in the army until 1819. In 1828 he was living in Illinois. His birth and death dates and medical history are all unknown.
So far we have very little on which to base any conclusions about tertiary syphilis. Will there be more in the records of York, Clark’s African American slave? His dark skin astonished the Indians. Might it have led to a more detailed record in the years after the expedition returned to St. Louis?
We know that York was about thirty-five years old, of great strength, and carried a gun in his years of crossing and recrossing the West. He had served as well as any man on the expedition. He thought so, too. After they returned to St. Louis he wished to join his wife in Louisville and asked Clark for his freedom. Clark beat him and did not release him for another ten years. When York was finally freed, he operated a freight wagon business in Tennessee and Kentucky. The business failed; York died of cholera around 1831. Again, nothing is known that is relevant to the theme of this study.
Along with the soldiers and York, there were ten engagées , men of French-Canadian descent who hired out their services to Lewis and Clark. One man, Pvt. Baptiste Deschamps, was patron (the head man) most likely because he spoke French and English. The last names of the ten were Malboeuf, Primaut, Hébert, La Jeunnesse, Pinaut, Roi, Collin, Carson, Caugee, and Rocque. Examination of their records reveals many tales of adventure but nothing that adds to our medical understanding.
There was one married couple with the Corps of Discovery: Tous-saint Charbonneau and his youngest wife, Sacagawea. He was born to French-Canadian parents around 1758; he spoke English, French, and several Indian languages and made his living as an interpreter. The captains admired little about him other than his interpretive skills, which were useless west of the Continental Divide. Lewis described him as “A man of no peculiar merit.” He supposedly was living among the Hidatsas in 1794 when he won Sacagawea in a gambling game. Assuming the truth of this story, she would have been five or six years old at the time; he would have been thirty-six. After his employment with Lewis and Clark, Charbonneau worked as a government interpreter until he was eighty, a ripe old age and not one suggestive of debilitating disease. As we have seen earlier, he may have given gonorrhea to Sacagawea.
His wife was, of course, the legendary guide and translator, and a following has grown up around her sufficient to generate several contradictory biographies and the issuance of a U.S. commemorative one-dollar coin. One source (apparently the better one) states that she died in 1812, while another claims 1884 as her final year. With such wild discrepancies in the most fundamental data, we once again are at a loss to make any statement about syphilis in this almost-mythic heroine. 7
This brings us to the two captains. William Clark was born in 1770 and died at St. Louis, Missouri, in 1838, at the age of sixty-eight. His respect for the Indians and his willingness to doctor them smoothed the way at many difficult moments. Sacagawea trusted him enough to commit her young son to his care, and Clark paid for the boy’s education. On his return from the voyage of discovery, Clark was appointed brigadier general of militia and principal Indian Agent for the Louisiana Territory. When he was thirty-seven he married sixteen-year-old Julia Hancock. In his role as Indian Agent he negotiated many treaties that were disasters for the Indians. His efforts to balance the demands of the settlers and the rights of the Indians were inherently flawed. In 1812 he was appointed governor of Louisiana, a vast territory. In spite of his deep disappointment with government policy toward the Indians as well as the death of his two wives and three of his seven children, Clark was described at age sixty-one as “hardy and vigorous as ever.” 8 This does not seem to describe a man with severe chronic disease, much less a man suffering from the ravages of late syphilis.
Only one man remains for study: the expedition’s leader, Meriwether Lewis. Let us begin with his death on October 10–11, 1809. Some called it murder; others called it suicide. The issue is confused by the absence of firsthand testimony and the conflicts between the many second-and thirdhand stories. Capt. (or Maj.) Gilbert C. Russell, who commanded Fort Pickering, near today’s Memphis, Tennessee, wrote to William Clark, who summarized Russell’s words in a letter of his own to his brother Jonathan dated November 26, 1809. While Russell’s original letter is lost, Clark told his brother that Russell had seen Lewis “in a State of Derangement” at Fort Pickering and that Russell had later heard from Lewis’s servant that Lewis had imagined the sound of Clark’s arrival along the Natchez Trace. Neither Clark nor Russell had any direct knowledge of the circumstances of Lewis’s death. 9
The servant was John Pernier, Lewis’s employee. Although Pernier spoke with someone in Nashville about the death and later spent four days with Jefferson at Monticello, no firsthand record of Pernier’s observations has ever been found and, most curiously, there is nothing in Jefferson’s own records.
Lewis died at a tiny Tennessee settlement called Grinder’s Stand. This inn was simplya dogtrot structure-two crude log cabins joined by a covered breezeway. The proprietors, Robert and Priscilla Griner, had their names misspelled in the earliest reports, and their names have remained thus misspelled for two centuries.
On October 10, 1806, Mr. Griner was away. Priscilla, one of the few actual witnesses, left no direct account in her own words. Eighteen months later, a close friend of Lewis’s, the noted ornithologist Alexander Wilson, visited Mrs. Griner and took notes of her story. The respected Lewis and Clark expert Elliott Coues had this to say of her account: “Her story is wildly improbable…not to be believed under oath…a concoction on the part of an accomplice in crime…until other evidence is forthcoming the victim of untimely fate should be given the benefit of the doubt.” Coues clearly felt it was murder, not suicide. 10
James Neely, a government employee traveling with Lewis, had fallen behind looking for horses that had strayed. When he reached Griner’s, Lewis was dead. Neely told two versions of what he found. In one, a report to Jefferson, Neely said that Lewis had two gunshot wounds. In the other, published in the Russellville, Kentucky, Farmer’s Friend , Neely said that Lewis had not only shot himself twice but had also cut himself. Captain Russell, in a letter written to Jefferson on January 10, 1810, accused Neely of being an indirect murderer by interfering in Lewis’s travel arrangements.
Conspiracy theorists have woven a wider web and suggested that Russell, Neely, Pernier, Aaron Burr, and Thomas Jefferson were all involved in an assassination plot, perhaps to silence Lewis for having known too much about some political skullduggery. The entirely disreputable General James Wilkinson is also put forward as a conspirator. 11
In 1809, Meriwether Lewis was as famous as Stonewall Jackson in 1862 or Charles Lindbergh in 1927, yet there was no formal inquiry into his death. Equally strange is the fact that no serious attempt to mark his grave was made until many years after the event. What do we really know about what happened that October night? Perhaps Coues said it best when he wrote, “This death remains a mystery: but mystery should not be paraded as history.” 12
If it was suicide, why would a governor, a celebrated explorer, a favorite of Jefferson, kill himself—shoot himself twice and (possibly) slash his own body from head to toe? What awful state of mind must have overwhelmed him? And what could have been the cause of such a desperate end? At least four possibilities present themselves: an underlying disposition to melancholia; an excess of alcohol; the political pressures upon him as governor of Missouri; the mental effects of encroaching syphilis; or some combination of these factors.
In attempting to examine the first possibility one must face the basic problem in psychiatric diagnosis: the basis is description, not laboratory numbers. While there are hints that such a day may come when a laboratory number, equivalent to blood sugar level or blood pressure, will distinguish between obsessive-compulsive disorder, bipolar disorder type II, and paranoid schizophrenia (to name just a few disorders), what we have today are elaborate paragraphs of behavioral criteria. Further, in the author’s long professional life the entire system of psychiatric diagnosis has been changed four times. The moral: take psychiatric labels with a grain of salt. They are the best we have, but they are not immutable.
What used to be called manic-depressive disorder is now called bipolar disorder. It may come in many different patterns, including the most prominent three: recurrent excitements, recurrent depressions, and alternating excitement and depression. Of course, there may be symptom-free intervals. Bipolar disorder seems to run in families. Whole textbooks of psychiatric genetics exist. For our purposes, families with bipolar disorder tend to produce children with bipolar disorders. What is the evidence for mood problems in the case of Meriwether Lewis?
The captain was the product of a confluence of two old Virginia families, the Lewises and the Meriwethers. Jefferson noted that the family was “subject to hypocondriac affections. It was a constitutional disposition in all the nearer branches of the family.” 13 The eleven marriages that joined Lewises with Meriwethers between 1725 and 1774 most likely deepened any such vulnerability to mood disorders by inbreeding. As Lewis came under Jefferson’s tutelage, the president noted, “While he lived with me in Washington, I observed at times sensible depressions of mind.” Having observed the same bouts of melancholia in Lewis’s father, Jefferson traced it to a “constitutional source.” 14 Jefferson had ordered Lewis to keep a daily log, yet he wrote scarcely a word between September 1805 and January 1806. This had been a direct order by the nation’s commander in chief, but it was not obeyed. There is no hint of strange behavior by Lewis in other men’s journals. Lewis continued his other duties on the way down the Columbia River, but he did not write. The simplest explanation is depression.
On February 27, 1807, Jefferson appointed Lewis governor of Louisiana, yet Lewis did not even arrive in St. Louis until late in the winter of 1808. Where was he all those long months? Some of the time he could be found drinking and embarking on failed courtships, but much of the time he seems to have disappeared. This would certainly raise the question of another paralyzing depressive episode. 15 During his governorship he made a number of financial decisions that suggested the overoptimism and expansiveness of a mild manic episode. If he was “up,” it didn’t last.
Equally possible is that the invisible governor of Missouri was in hiding, enduring the long and troublesome mercury treatment for syphilis. Then as now, syphilis was a low-prestige diagnosis, certainly something that a national hero and a newly minted governor might wish to conceal.
In early September 1809, with his finances and public life in shambles, he left St. Louis for Washington DC , hoping to untangle his affairs and explain matters to President Madison. He planned to travel to New Orleans and there take an oceangoing vessel to Philadelphia. On the way down the river toward New Orleans he attempted suicide. He got off the boat at Fort Pickering and wrote an incoherent note to Madison that he feared going by sea, lest the British seize his journals. After seven days, Captain Russell, commanding the fort, reported that “all symptoms of his derangement disappeared.” 16
Lewis and his party headed east up the Natchez Trace. He told his companions that Clark was just behind him on the trail and would soon catch up with them. This, of course, was more than a melancholic sadness; it was a psychotic delusion or perhaps delirium tremens from alcohol withdrawal. Clark was hundreds of miles away. There had never been a plan for Clark to meet them. A few hours later, Lewis was dead. On hearing the news, Clark exclaimed, “I fear, O I fear, the weight of his mind has overcome him.” 17 Certainly a depressive illness could explain all his troubles, but three other possibilities need to be explored.
Alcohol has been the ruin of many men. In 1805, Americans drank a lot. The average citizen of drinking age consumed seven gallons of pure alcohol a year, or fourteen gallons a year of 100-proof whiskey, or almost five quarts of whiskey a month. 18 Several English travelers to postcolonial America noted that Virginia gentlemen began the morning with a large glass of rum and remained “in a state of stupe faction” until bedtime. Lewis was certainly from that social class. In the early summer of 1807, when he was supposed to be in St. Louis governing a vast territory, he was in Philadelphia, out drinking every night with his friend Mahlon Dickerson. He attended numerous balls and testimonial dinners in his role as one of America’s most famous men. Drinking was always a part of such gatherings. In the early summer of 1809 he was in St. Louis, where he consumed large quantities of opium “for the malaria.” This was nonsense; Lewis knew full well that the symptoms of malaria were treated (and treated successfully) with quinine, in the form of Peruvian bark. When he had “a fever” he took three grams of opium at night and two more in the morning. Even if this were a translation error, with grains rather than grams, it was far too much. In September he was drinking and taking opium. He was also telling people that his work on the journals was complete and the long-awaited compilation was ready for the printer—which was either a lie or a delusion. Lewis lived generations before Alcoholics Anonymous or Antabuse. There was no “cure” except “taking the pledge,” which rarely worked. He lived in an age when gentleman drank heavily but were supposed to function anyway. Alcohol may well have played a part in his self-destruction. 19
Who was running government affairs in the vast Louisiana Territory during Lewis’s long absence? It was Frederick Bates, with the titles of secretary and acting governor, and Bates was desperate for Lewis’s arrival. St. Louis was torn in every direction. The wealthy Spanish and French families, with their vast estates and trade monopolies, were deeply resentful of the influx of Americans, who in turn resented the wealth, privileges, and hauteur of the old families. Hordes of slaves, boatmen, renegades, and Indians flooded the streets. The question of Indian trade and who was to reap the imagined fortunes in that trade had lead to endless quarrels, plots, and factions. Meanwhile, Jefferson was out of office and the Madison administration was much less sympathetic to Lewis. As an explorer-hero, he was one thing. As a governor, he was quite another and subject to the political intrigues that always surround such a post. Furthering the already muddy waters were plots to detach the West from the United States, plots hatched by General Wilkinson, commanding general of the U.S. Army, who was also a paid agent of the Spanish government, working in collusion with Aaron Burr. Bates, an experienced bureaucrat, was unable to manage the situation. What was Lewis to do, a man with almost no real political experience and a tendency to give orders in situations where no man would obey? Lewis bought things, thinking the government would pay. The two-month turnaround time for correspondence and the tendency for the new administration to refuse payment of even the most reasonable expenses left him stuck with the bills to pay out of his own pocket. And that was already empty from his business speculations. The new governor was soon a candidate for debtors prison! His already precarious mental balance was strained by a situation that would upset even the calmest man. And there was a fourth factor, one that may have been entangled in the other three—a possible syphilitic deterioration of his brain.
Earlier we saw that neurosyphilis can cause poor judgment, paranoia, irritability, emotional overreaction, personality changes, depression, inappropriate gaiety, and the delusion of being healthy. Certainly many of these describe the last two years of Lewis’s life. If he knew that he had progressive syphilis, he might have drunk more and taken more opium to dull the horror of witnessing his own deterioration. If he was unaware of his own impending collapse, it might explain his cavalier approach to being governor, in which he demanded his salary but didn’t even bother to go to St. Louis for almost a year. He rarely wrote to Clark and had estranged himself from Jefferson. In those lost months, was he hidden away, taking mercury in an attempt at cure? We don’t know. We will never know. But a scientific assessment of the disintegration of a brilliant young man requires an honest look. And as we have seen earlier, the moral stigma of venereal disease is both harsh and unwarranted, but the biological stigmata are inexorable.
From the journals it would appear that neither captain had a female bed partner during the two-year journey. Lewis, as first among the two equal captains, may have felt the greater need to set an example of good behavior. When could he have had a sexual connection without having it easily noticed? Epidemiologist Reimert Raven-holt suggests the night of August 13, 1805. Lewis had only three men with him; the rest of the expedition was four days’ march away. They had just encountered the Shoshones and were being welcomed by them. “This evening the Indians entertained us with their dancing all night. At 12 o’clock [midnight] I grew sleepy and retired to rest leaving the men to amuse themselves with the Indians…I was several times awoke in the course of the night by their yells but was too much fatigued to be deprived of a tolerable night’s repose.” Ravenholt’s speculation is based on a single written record, one that makes no mention of sexual contact on Lewis’s part, a slender reed indeed. 20
Four years after meeting with the Shoshones, Lewis was dead. Four years is long enough for tertiary syphilis to work its dreadful effects on brain and personality. What a witches’ brew may have felled the great captain: a powerful familial trait of depression; years of heavy drinking and opium use; a very difficult political situation; and syphilis of the brain. The records of two hundred years ago are insufficient to untangle the cause or cluster of causes of his tragic end. Medical records as we know them today were nearly nonexistent. It is ironic that some of the best clinical notes of the era were those kept by Lewis himself in treating members of the Corps.
A summing up will show several key points. Lewis’s shopping list shows that he anticipated venereal disease among his men. There is evidence in the records that syphilis was already widespread among the villages that the expedition visited, although whether the Corps brought further venereal disease to the Indians is unknown. There is evidence that there were sexual relations between many of the men of the Corps and some of the Indian women. There is evidence that many, perhaps all, of the men received mercury treatment. In the records of the expedition after its return there is almost nothing to prove or disprove tertiary syphilis. In Lewis’s tragic death there is the distinct possibility that syphilis played a part.
On a wider scale, it would seem that the role of venereal disease has been given insufficient weight in understanding the challenges and dangers faced by the justly famous Corps of Discovery. The hardships they endured and the completion of their trip with only one death are almost unparalleled in the history of exploration.
Whatever pain and disability the men suffered from venereal disease were wounds received in the service of their country. For every aspect of their immortal journey, they deserved and still deserve the thanks of a grateful nation.