Meriwether Lewis

Meriwether Lewis was born on August 18, 1774, at Locust Hill, his father’s farm in Albemarle County, VirginiaVirginiaVirginia, officially the Commonwealth of Virginia, is a U.S. state whose capital is Richmond. It entered the Union on June 25, 1788, as the 10th state, and had a population of 8,631,393 in the 2020 census (April 1, 2020).Open the full entry, about ten miles west of Monticello. He was the first son of William Lewis and Lucy Meriwether, who were second cousins.⁠[1][2][3]

His father died in 1779, of pneumonia, while serving in the Continental Army, and Lewis inherited the Locust Hill estate. The Lewis family and Thomas Jefferson had grown up together in Virginia; two of Jefferson’s relatives married into the Lewis family, and Lewis’s uncle Nicholas Lewis managed all of Jefferson’s affairs during his four years as a diplomat in Paris.⁠[2][4][3][5][1]

After his mother married Captain John Marks, she moved around 1784 with her husband and Lewis’s brother Reuben to the Goose Pond community on the Broad River in northeastern Georgia; whether Lewis lived there is uncertain, though he is known to have visited at least twice. In 1787 he returned to Virginia to study with private tutors, among them Dr. Charles Everitt, the blind parson James Waddell and Parson Matthew Maury.⁠[3][6]

After John Marks died, Lewis traveled to the Broad River community in 1792 and brought his mother and his half-siblings John and Mary back to Locust Hill.⁠[3]

In 1794 Lewis joined the Virginia militia to help suppress the Whiskey Rebellion in PennsylvaniaPennsylvaniaPennsylvania (officially the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania) is a Middle Atlantic state of the United States; its capital is Harrisburg, and Philadelphia and Pittsburgh are its two great metropolitan areas. One of the original 13 states, it ratified the U.S. Constitution on December 12, 1787, the second state to do so. Its population in the 2020 census (April 1, 2020) was 13,002,700.Open the full entry. In 1795, during the Northwest Indian War, he joined the U.S. Army and was commissioned an ensign, becoming a lieutenant in 1799 and a captain in 1800. For a time he served in a rifle company commanded by William Clark.⁠[4][7][6]

After his election as president, Thomas Jefferson wrote to Lewis on February 23, 1801, asking him to become his private secretary; Lewis accepted on March 10, keeping his army rank and right of promotion. Jefferson cited their personal acquaintance and the “knowledge of the Western country, of the army & it’s situation” that Lewis had gained in the army.⁠[1][5]

The National Park Service notes that Jefferson wanted to reduce the size of the army and needed Lewis’s knowledge of which officers he could trust. Lewis helped classify officers on a roster dated July 24, 1801, assessing their competence and probable political leanings. He served as secretary for about two years.⁠[5][1]

Congress appropriated funds for the expedition on February 28, 1803, and Jefferson named Lewis its commander that year. In spring 1803 Lewis studied in Philadelphia with Andrew Ellicott (map making and surveying), Benjamin Smith Barton (botany), Robert Patterson (mathematics), Caspar Wistar (anatomy and fossils) and Benjamin Rush (medicine), and twice visited the arsenal at Harpers Ferry for rifles and other supplies, which were shipped to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.⁠[7][4]

In Philadelphia he bought equipment including a chronometer, a sextant, an air rifle and 193 pounds of portable soup, as well as glass beads, mirrors and peace medals as gifts for Native Americans, in line with Jefferson’s instruction to treat them “in the most friendly and conciliatory manner.” In June 1803 he asked William Clark to co-lead the expedition.⁠[7][8]

On May 14, 1804, Clark and the Corps of Discovery left Camp River Dubois near St. Louis, and Lewis joined them at St. Charles, MissouriMissouriMissouri is a state of the United States bounded on the east by the Mississippi River; its capital is Jefferson City, its largest city is Kansas City, and its second-largest is St. Louis. It was admitted to the Union on August 10, 1821, as the 24th state, and its population in the 2020 census (April 1, 2020) was 6,154,913.Open the full entry. The expedition had more than 45 members, including 27 young, unmarried soldiers, York, who had been enslaved by Clark since childhood, and Lewis’s Newfoundland dog, Seaman. Travel up the Missouri averaged about 15 miles a day.⁠[9]

Sergeant Charles Floyd died on August 20, most historians believe of a burst appendix; he was the expedition’s only fatality. In September 1804 a council with the Teton Sioux near present-day Pierre, South DakotaSouth DakotaSouth Dakota is a U.S. state bordered by North Dakota to the north, Minnesota and Iowa to the east, Nebraska to the south, and Wyoming and Montana to the west. Its capital is Pierre and its largest city is Sioux Falls. It was admitted to the Union on November 2, 1889, as the 40th state, and the 2020 census (April 1, 2020) counted 886,667 residents.Open the full entry, nearly led to disaster. In October the Corps reached the Mandan and Hidatsa villages and built Fort Mandan near present-day Washburn, North DakotaNorth DakotaNorth Dakota is a state in the north-central United States; its capital is Bismarck. It was admitted to the Union on November 2, 1889, as the 39th state, and its population in the 2020 census (April 1, 2020) was 779,094.Open the full entry, for the winter, recruiting Toussaint Charbonneau as interpreter, who came with his Shoshone wife, Sacagawea, and their newborn son, Jean Baptiste.⁠[8][9]

On April 7, 1805, the Corps sent the keelboat back to St. Louis and, now 33 strong, continued in two pirogues and six dugout canoes. On August 17 they reached the navigable limit of the Missouri in the Rocky Mountains, crossed the Continental Divide at Lemhi Pass, bought horses from the Shoshones, crossed the Bitterroot Range on the Lolo Trail and descended the Clearwater, Snake and Columbia rivers, reaching the Pacific Ocean by November 1805. In December they built Fort Clatsop on the south side of the Columbia near present-day Astoria, OregonOregonOregon (officially the State of Oregon) is a state on the Pacific coast of the western United States; its capital is Salem and its largest city is Portland. It was admitted to the Union on February 14, 1859, as the 33rd state. Its population in the 2020 census (April 1, 2020) was 4,237,256.Open the full entry, for the winter.⁠[8]

The return journey began on March 23, 1806. At Lolo Pass the party split, Lewis going north and Clark south to the Yellowstone River; on the Marias River Lewis’s party fought Piegan Blackfeet and killed two of them, the expedition’s only violent clash. The groups reunited at the mouth of the Yellowstone and arrived back in St. Louis on September 23, 1806.⁠[8][9]

The expedition covered more than 8,000 miles in less than two and a half years, lost only one member and cost taxpayers $40,000; Lewis and Clark documented more than 200 plant species and 120 animals. Afterward Congress granted Lewis double pay and 1,600 acres of public land. BritannicaEncyclopædia BritannicaEncyclopædia Britannica is a general English-language encyclopedia first published in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1768; the name also refers to its publisher, Chicago-based Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. (which presents itself as The Britannica Group). The print edition ended in 2012, and the company’s main businesses since then have been the online encyclopedia Britannica.com, digital education products for schools and libraries, and Merriam-Webster dictionaries.Open the full entry calls the expedition’s records “a national treasure.”⁠[9][4]

In March 1807 Thomas Jefferson appointed Lewis governor of the Louisiana Territory. Still in the East working on an account of the expedition and attending the trial of Aaron BurrAaron BurrAaron Burr (1756–1836) was an American lawyer and politician who drove the founding of the Manhattan Company, and he served as the third Vice President of the United States (1801–1805). In 1799, he used the surplus-capital clause in a water company’s charter to start a banking business; the bank later became one of the historical predecessors of JPMorgan Chase. In 1804, he fought a duel with Alexander Hamilton in which Hamilton was mortally wounded and died the next day; in 1807, he was acquitted in a treason trial.Open the full entry in Virginia, he did not reach St. Louis to take up the post until March 1808.⁠[6][4]

After the Embargo Act of late 1807, federal funding for the territorial government was slow, and Lewis paid some expenses himself and sought reimbursement. He authorized Fort Madison, in present-day IowaIowaIowa is a state in the Midwestern United States; its capital and largest city is Des Moines. It was admitted to the Union on December 28, 1846, as the 29th state, and its population in the 2020 census (April 1, 2020) was 3,190,369.Open the full entry, and Fort Osage, in present-day Jackson County, Missouri, and held contentious treaty negotiations with the Osage. Federal officials rejected his reimbursement requests, his creditors pressed for payment, and his conflict with territorial secretary Frederick Bates raised the prospect of his recall.⁠[6]

On September 4, 1809, Lewis left St. Louis for Washington, D.C., carrying his financial records and expedition notebooks, to protest in person the War Department’s refusal of his payment vouchers. He had planned to travel by river and sea but changed his route out of concern for his journals, and on September 29 he set out overland from Fort Pickering, at present-day Memphis, TennesseeTennesseeTennessee is a U.S. state in the southeast-central United States, with its capital at Nashville. It was admitted to the Union on June 1, 1796, as the 16th state, and the 2020 census (April 1, 2020) counted 6,910,840 residents.Open the full entry, with John Pernia, Major James Neelly and Neelly’s enslaved servant.⁠[10][6]

On the evening of October 10, 1809, Lewis reached Grinder’s Stand, an inn on the Natchez Trace about 70 miles from Nashville. During the night Mrs. Grinder heard two gunshots and found him bleeding from his wounds; by sunrise on October 11 he was dead, at the age of 35. Neelly arrived later that day and arranged for his burial a few hundred yards from the stand.⁠[11][6][4]

The National Park Service states that historical accounts support the probability of suicide; the State of Missouri’s biography says the evidence indicates the wounds were self-inflicted but that it is unclear whether intentionally or accidentally. Britannica notes that scholars still debate whether his death was suicide, murder or an accident.⁠[11][6][4]

In 1848 the Tennessee legislature provided $500 for a monument at Lewis’s grave, whose broken shaft followed a 19th-century custom symbolizing a life cut short. On February 6, 1925, President Calvin CoolidgeCalvin CoolidgeCalvin Coolidge (1872–1933) was an American lawyer and politician who served as governor of Massachusetts and, from 1921, as vice president of the United States; he succeeded Warren G. Harding as the 30th president in August 1923, was elected to a full term in 1924 and served until 1929.Open the full entry used the Antiquities Act of 1906 to establish the Meriwether Lewis National Monument, managed by the War Department; it passed to the National Park Service in 1933, came under the Natchez Trace Parkway in July 1939 and was formally transferred to the parkway on August 10, 1961.⁠[10]

Lewis County, Missouri, was named for him when it was formed in 1833. Charles Willson Peale painted a bust-length portrait of Lewis in 1807.⁠[6][1]

Natchez Trace Parkway (Meriwether Lewis Site, National Park Service): Official website: https://www.nps.gov/natr/learn/historyculture/exploring-the-meriwether-lewis-site.htm (opens in a new window).⁠[10]