The Only Witness Told It Three Ways

What We Know

Robert Grinder was not at home on the evening of October 10, 1809. He was probably twenty-odd miles off at the family’s Duck River place, so when a traveler rode up asking for a bed, the person who met him was Grinder’s wife, Priscilla. The place was two log cabins joined by a covered breezeway, seventy-two miles from Nashville on the Natchez Trace. Besides Priscilla Grinder there were her young children and a young enslaved girl named Malinda. The two servants riding with the traveler bedded down in a barn two hundred yards off.

The traveler was Meriwether Lewis, thirty-five, governor of the Louisiana Territory, three years back from the Pacific. He was riding to Washington to answer for territorial expenses the War Department had challenged. He had left St. Louis on September 4 and written a will along the way. At Fort Pickering on the Chickasaw Bluffs, the commanding officer held him two weeks and swore afterward that the boat crew had told him Lewis twice tried to kill himself on the river. Major James Neelly, the federal agent to the Chickasaw, took charge of him after that. Neelly was a day behind on the road, hunting two horses that had strayed in the night.

By Mrs. Grinder’s account, Lewis was strange all evening. He paced in the yard and muttered. He spoke violently at supper and then, minutes later, was perfectly composed. He refused a bed and asked for bear skins and a buffalo robe for the floor. She heard him walking and talking to himself for hours, she said, like a lawyer.

Around three in the morning she heard two pistol shots.

Lewis was found with a wound to the head and another a little below the breast. He lived until daylight. Neelly rode up later that morning, buried him beside the road, and wrote to Thomas Jefferson a week later that the governor had shot himself. No physician examined the body. Whether a coroner’s jury ever sat is itself unsettled, and no report of one survives. The first inquest into this death whose record exists was held in 1996.

The Roadblock

Every version of the hours before daylight traces back to Priscilla Grinder, and she gave at least three.

The first reached Jefferson inside Neelly’s letter of October 18, 1809: she heard the shots, woke the servants, and they got there too late. The second she told in the spring of 1811 to Alexander Wilson, the ornithologist, who rode out of his way to find the grave and found it under a few loose rails. In that telling she woke nobody. She watched through the unplastered logs while Lewis staggered into the yard and fell against a stump, and she waited for daylight — roughly two hours — before sending her children to the barn. Wilson was angry at her for it and wrote it down anyway.

A third version, given nearly thirty years later, has two or three men riding up at dusk and Lewis drawing a brace of pistols to challenge them to a duel. Even Vardis Fisher, who thought Lewis was murdered, threw that one out.

Then the historian John Guice noticed the calendar. The moon was new on October 9. Two nights later there was almost no light in that yard, and not one account mentions a candle or a lantern. Priscilla Grinder could not have watched what she said she watched.

And nothing exists to check her against. No surviving inquest, no examination, no second adult awake in the house.

Best Guesses

Suicide at the end of a breakdown

Everyone who actually knew Lewis believed it. Clark, hearing the news, wrote to his brother: “I fear O! I fear the waight of his mind has over come him.” Jefferson, composing a memoir four years later, described a man “subject to hypochondriac affections” since youth and “in a paroxysm of one of these” when he set out, then declined to use the word: “about three o’clock in the night he did the deed.” Gilbert Russell’s deposition and another officer’s letter both report attempts on the river. None of them was there. All of them were reading the same two channels: Neelly’s letter, and Priscilla Grinder.

Killed by a robber on the Trace

Nothing was ever reported missing. Neelly secured the trunks and papers and sent them on, and no account of that morning establishes that anything had been taken. What keeps the theory standing is an official document. In 1848 Tennessee sent a committee to raise a monument over the grave. They opened it, examined the upper skeleton to be certain of the man, and reported that it “seems to be more probable that he died by the hands of an assassin.” They gave no reason. The road had earned its reputation, and Lewis was riding it with about $220, nearly half of that a Treasury check, Clark’s land warrant, the expedition papers, two horses, a rifle, pistols and a dirk. Richard Dillon’s candidate was an unknown land pirate, or a local man named Runnion.

Silenced on General Wilkinson’s orders

James Wilkinson governed the territory before Lewis, drawing a Spanish pension throughout. Kira Gale and forensic scientist James Starrs argue that he had Lewis killed over land dealings and mine records that would have exposed him. Anthony Wayne called him a “vile assassin” in 1795, and Gale cites sworn testimony that he tried to have an officer assassinated in 1806. They argue too that the suicide record was manufactured afterward: Neelly’s letter in another officer’s hand above a forged signature, the 1811 Russell deposition neither written nor signed by Russell. Donald Jackson, Gary Moulton and James Holmberg have never been persuaded, and the theory still has to swallow a letter reporting the river attempts, dated two weeks before there was a death to explain.

Only the remains can settle it

Guice, who spent a career here, states it without decoration: nobody knows, because nobody watched the two .69-caliber balls fired. What could arbitrate is skeletal: the angle of entry, an exit wound or the absence of one, powder residue at contact range, and the mitochondrial DNA Starrs has already banked from Lewis’s female-line relatives. The 1848 committee got there first, though, with shovels and no protocol. A coroner’s jury asked for a real examination in 1996. A federal court left the call with the Park Service in 1998, and it had refused twice by then.

The Verdict

Lewis is where Neelly left him, under the broken column Tennessee raised in 1848, in a cemetery holding 109 other graves, some of them still unlocated. Those other graves are what the Interior Department cited in 2010 when it withdrew the exhumation it had approved two years earlier and called the matter closed. That is reasoning about the ground, not about him, and it does not expire on its own.

A forensic reading might fail anyway. The 1848 committee reached the upper skeleton first, and 217 years of Tennessee soil have had a turn since. It is still the only test nobody has run. Every other channel into that night was worked out long ago by people who came away with opposite convictions. What is left of this case is a permit application.