Exploring Meriwether Lewis

Meriwether Lewis died at an isolated backwoods wayside inn more than two hundred years ago. Did he die by his own hand or that of an assailant? What circumstances brought him to be in that cabin along the Natchez Trace rather than his gubernatorial office in St. Louis, or the seat of national government in Washington, or overseeing the publication in Philadelphia of the history of the epic expedition to the Pacific he co-led with his partner in discovery, William Clark? Why did his postexpedition life fail to achieve the seeming promise of success and fame everyone assumed it would upon the expedition’s return in the fall of 1806?

These are the basic questions Clay S. Jenkinson and Thomas C. Danisi pose, examine, and attempt to answer in their most recent Lewis biographies. Jenkinson’s The Character of Meriwether Lewis: Explorer in the Wilderness and Danisi’s Uncovering the Truth about Meriwether Lewis both build upon their own earlier books of similar titles. Meriwether Lewis is a subject they have spent years writing about. Both, for the most part, have done thorough research, discovering new sources of information regarding the explorer (especially true of Danisi) in attempting to answer questions about his life and death that elude us to this day. Both also employ an episodic approach to their subject, focusing on certain events in the explorer’s life they believe to be revelatory turning points. Neither book would be complete without addressing what happened—or might have happened—in that backwoods inn where Lewis died. Jenkinson, a humanities scholar and well-known living history impersonator of Thomas Jefferson, Lewis, and other historical figures, strives—and in many ways succeeds—to get inside Lewis’s head in order to best understand and accurately portray him. Danisi merits praise on the depth of his research, his detailed review of thousands of pages of government documents not previously used by Lewis and Clark researchers, and his pursuit of leads in manuscript collections of Lewis’s contemporaries—all yielding important information about the explorer and increasing our knowledge and understanding of Lewis’s life and times. While anyone interested in the Lewis and Clark saga will surely find Jenkinson’s and Danisi’s studies rewarding, I mean to focus here on several issues that give me some concern.

Both Jenkinson and Danisi are great admirers of Meriwether Lewis. Perhaps wanting not to appear unduly adulatory, Jenkinson at times seems to go out of his way to criticize the explorer’s egotism and other failings, real or perceived. One example is his portrayal of Lewis’s reaction to Private Hugh McNeal’s behavior upon reaching the source of the “mighty & heretofore deemed endless Missouri” in August 1805. Lewis, whom Jenkinson believes was a deist, like his mentor Thomas Jefferson, reported that McNeal, probably a Roman Catholic, thanked “his god” for allowing the party to reach this goal. Jenkinson asserts that

Lewis makes sure we know that he did not thank God for permitting him to reach the source of the endless river, but that such gratitude was appropriate for a man of different (and lesser) religious sensibilities. Probably Lewis felt a certain level of condescension towards poor McNeal, a throwback to papal credulity and superstition in the brave new world of science and reason.

McNeal, Jenkinson concludes, becomes a “serio-comic doppelganger Lewis can simultaneously borrow from and gently sneer at.” A few days earlier William Clark had intended to scout ahead in search of the Missouri’s source, but a painful carbuncle on his ankle prevented him for doing so. Jenkinson states that when Clark couldn’t go, “his glory-greedy partner in discovery” happily set off instead. For someone who obviously admires the man and his accomplishments, such discrediting doesn...