A century ago there was no
more promising youth in America than Meriwether Lewis. After a brilliant
career as a soldier, he had been appointed private secretary to President
Jefferson, and had shown himself so trustworthy, so energetic, so resourceful,
that when Jefferson determined to make an exploration of the great territory
he was just purchasing, he selected Lewis as the one to accomplish it,
knowing how thoroughly he could rely on his accuracy and his truthfulness.
Six years later, in 1809, his brilliant
feat accomplished—he was even then but thirty-five years old—Lewis left
his beloved West for the last time and set out for Washington to confer
with the President. He crossed the Mississippi at the Chickasaw Bluffs,
where Memphis now stands, and taking Indian trails southeasterly, struck
the Trace at the crossing of the Tennessee River, in Lauderdale County,
Alabama. Turning toward Nashville, he came alone, on the night of October
11th, to the “stand” or tavern of Robert Grinder above the crossing of
Little Swan, seventy-two miles from Nashville. Accommodations were rude,
and Lewis wrapped himself in his buffalo-robe and slept on the floor. A
heavy storm was raging. In the night the women in an adjoining building
heard a shot. In the morning Lewis was found dying, a pistol beside him.
Grinder circulated the report that Lewis
had shot himself, and the explorer was buried beside the road close to
the tavern. At Washington then, and by many historians since, Grinder's
story has been believed; but by the settlers of that vicinity and by the
women who lived at Grinder's, only one opinion was ever entertained—that
Grinder had murdered him for his money. Grinder, at any rate, was known
to have money in his possession after Lewis’s death. He sold out his place
and moved away. But the fame of Lewis has been blotted to this day by the
story that he took his own life in a fit of melancholia. For forty years
his grave remained unmarked. Then the Tennessee Legislature appropriated
five hundred dollars for a monument; the bones were dug up and identified;
an irregular county, having the grave as its approximate CENTER, was named
Lewis, and a few acres about the monument set aside for a park. Since then
nothing has been done to care for it, but the broken column stands as it
was placed, beside the forsaken road.
So on that breathless afternoon my pilgrimage
had its end. I had come to find this traditional shaft to a traditional
man, whose traditional murder marked the CENTER of a county. But I found
his monument was greater than that, for it was the old road itself over
which he had traveled, and the hilltop on which he died, and the forest
which still covers it. Into them all his soul has entered.
I think he would not have ordered his
burial in any other place.
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