Meriwether Lewis

Pneumonia took his father in November 1779, when the boy was five, and his mother remarried and hauled the family down to the Broad River valley in Georgia. He got no schooling at all there until he was 13. What he got instead was the woods — hunting at night in midwinter with nothing but a dog for company, and a mother who taught him which wild plants were medicine. Virginia reclaimed him for private tutors under an uncle's guardianship. He marched against the Whiskey Rebellion with the militia in 1794, took an ensign's commission the next year, made captain by 1800, and served for a stretch under an officer named William Clark. On April 1, 1801, he moved into the presidential mansion as Thomas Jefferson's secretary.

Jefferson handed him a continent, and he recruited Clark to split the command of it. The assignment had three parts — find a water route to Asia, catalogue what grew and moved out there, and announce American sovereignty to the Native nations along the Missouri. He spent May 1803 in Philadelphia buying instruments and sitting with scientists. The Corps of Discovery left Fort Mandan in April 1805 with Sacagawea, crossed the Rockies, and stood on the Pacific shore that November. At councils along the way Lewis let York, an enslaved man, and Sacagawea vote. They came back in 1806 with maps, specimens and notebooks, the first American crossing to the Pacific coast, and Congress gave him 1,600 acres. He never managed to turn the notebooks into a book.

Jefferson made him governor of the Louisiana Territory in 1807 and the job broke him. He published the territory's first laws and brokered peace between quarreling nations, but he fought constantly with his own territorial secretary, Frederick Bates, who wrote to Washington accusing him of profiting from a mission to escort a Mandan chief home. The War Department then refused to reimburse money Lewis had advanced out of his own pocket. His creditors read the news, called in his notes, and he sold off property to cover them, including the acres the expedition had earned him. He never married. Some historians read heavy drinking and opiates into the record and others answer that Bates never alleged anything of the kind — malaria, syphilis, mercury and depression have all been proposed and none of it is settled.

He set out for Washington on September 3, 1809, to argue about the vouchers, turned inland onto the Natchez Trace, and died before sunrise on October 11 at an inn called Grinder's Stand, shot in the head and the gut, with the money he had borrowed for the journey gone. A coroner's inquest charged nobody. Jefferson and Clark accepted suicide. His relatives never did, and when Tennessee opened the grave in 1848 to raise a monument, the state commission reported that murder seemed more probable. His kin petitioned for a forensic exhumation from 1993 until the Interior Department closed the question in 2010. The government paid his estate what it owed him two years after he died.

Meriwether Lewis's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Corps of Discovery mission
  The transcontinental expedition he commanded jointly with William Clark 1804
• The expedition journals book
  Field notebooks of the crossing — he could never finish preparing them 1806
• The first published laws of Upper Louisiana law
  Issued as territorial governor at St. Louis 1808
• History of the Expedition Under the Command of Lewis and Clark book
  Assembled after his death and edited by Nicholas Biddle 1814

• November 1779 aged 5 His father dies of pneumonia Lewis was five. His mother remarried and moved the family to Georgia.
• 1794 aged ~20 Marches with the Virginia militia against the Whiskey Rebellion
• April 1, 1801 aged 26 Becomes private secretary to President Thomas Jefferson He lived in the presidential mansion. The American Philosophical Society elected him the following year.
• May 1803 aged 28 Spends a month in Philadelphia with scientists, buying instruments and supplies
• November 1805 aged 31 The Corps of Discovery reaches the Pacific They had left Fort Mandan that April with Sacagawea.
• 1807 aged ~33 Appointed governor of the Louisiana Territory He settled in St. Louis and quarreled with his territorial secretary from the start.
• September 3, 1809 aged 35 Sets out for Washington to contest his rejected vouchers
• October 11, 1809 aged 35 Dies of gunshot wounds at Grinder's Stand on the Natchez Trace No one reported seeing it happen. The coroner's inquest charged nobody.
• 1848 aged ~74 Tennessee opens the grave and reports that murder seems more probable The state raised a broken-column monument over it, the design meaning a life cut short.

• William Clark 1770–1838
  Co-leader of the Lewis and Clark Expedition and later Superintendent of Indian Affairs. shared command with
• Thomas Jefferson 1743–1826
  Principal author of the Declaration of Independence and third President who oversaw the Louisiana Purchase. sent west by
• Sacagawea 1788–1812
  Shoshone woman who guided the Lewis and Clark Expedition through the Louisiana Territory. traveled with
• John James Audubon 1785–1851
  Naturalist and illustrator whose Birds of America shaped American ornithology and the society bearing his name. catalogued the same country
• Zebulon Pike 1779–1813
  Army officer who led expeditions to the Southwest and after whom Pikes Peak is named. sent on the next survey
• John C. Frémont 1813–1890
  Explorer and military officer whose five expeditions mapped much of the American West. followed the route west