Who killed Meriwether Lewis?

A forensic scientist named James Starrs thinks the famous explorer may have been murdered -- and wants to dig up his body to try to find out.

By Leighton Woodhouse

Mar 23, 1999 | In the afternoon of Oct. 10, 1809, Meriwether Lewis rode up to an inn called Grinder's Stand, a small log cabin in the Tennessee mountains on the Natchez Trace, the old pioneer road between Natchez, Miss., and Nashville, Tenn. He was traveling to Washington, where he hoped to clear up debts to the War Department he had incurred while serving as the first American governor of the Louisiana Territory. Then he planned to deliver the priceless journals of his great expedition, which had come to a triumphant conclusion just three years earlier, to his Philadelphia publishers.

The 35-year-old explorer appears to have been in a desperate state. One month earlier, on Sept. 11, he had written his will. At about the same time, according to a letter written by the commander of a fort where Lewis had stayed on his trip, Lewis had twice tried to kill himself, either by jumping overboard or by shooting himself, while traveling down the Mississippi River by boat. The commander, Capt. Gilbert Russell, wrote that he had been forced to hold Lewis, who had been drinking heavily, on 24-hour suicide watch at the fort for a week. Lewis' companion on the trip, James Neelly, later told Thomas Jefferson that Lewis "appeared at times deranged in mind." Historians have speculated that Lewis may have been tormented by manic depression, or even suffering from syphilis.

Lewis asked Mrs. Grinder, whose husband was absent, whether there was room in her inn. Neelly had stayed behind to round up two stray horses and was planning on meeting Lewis at the next residence inhabited by white people. Except for two servants, who were trailing behind, burdened by heavy trunks, Lewis was alone.

According to the conventional scholarly view, later that night, Lewis, after tormentedly pacing in his room for several hours and talking out loud, shot himself once in the head, grazing his skull, and then again in the chest. Still alive, he may or may not have tried to finish the job by cutting himself from head to toe with his razor blades. He died shortly after sunrise on Oct. 11.

On the face of it, there would not seem to be much reason to question this account. But there has long been a dissenting body of thought that holds that Lewis was not the victim of a suicide, but of a murder. This position was first enunciated by scholar Vardis Fisher in his 1962 book "Suicide or Murder? The Strange Death of Governor Meriwether Lewis." Eldon G. Chuinard, the authority on the medical history of the Lewis and Clark expedition, took a similar position in a journal article published in 1992.

The dispute might have remained one of those unresolvable hobby-horses of interest only to a passionate handful of historians and Americana buffs. But recently, thanks to James E. Starrs, it has heated up. Starrs, a professor of law and forensic sciences at George Washington University, also believes that Meriwether Lewis may have been murdered -- but he is not content to debate the issue in the pages of obscure journals. Starrs wants more concrete evidence: He wants to dig up Meriwether Lewis' remains.

In 1996, Starrs spearheaded a plan to exhume Lewis' remains, and helped convince a Tennessee coroner's jury that the National Park Service, on whose land Lewis is buried, should allow it. Only through such an investigation, Starrs believes, will it be possible to render a decisive, scientific verdict to end the debate.

Starrs has been joined in his effort by John Guice, a history professor at the University of Southern Mississippi, who has been studying the history of the Natchez Trace for 10 years. "When I started researching the history of the Natchez Trace," Guice says, "it became abundantly clear to me that the only way that we would get a definitive answer [about] Meriwether Lewis would be to have a forensic examination of his remains. I might add that this is a conclusion I reached before I ever heard of professor Starrs."

Starrs' exhumation effort also has the overwhelming endorsement of Lewis' descendants, 160 of whom have signed a statement supporting it. Dr. William Anderson of Williamsburg, Va., one of Lewis' two closest living relatives, calls Starrs' proposal a "wonderful opportunity ... a golden opportunity to attempt to find out what happened."

"There's been a lot of conjecture, imagination and fictionalizing in books and so on, but very little of it is based on known fact," he says. "And the only chance I can see of ever settling the thing would be what professor Starrs hopes to do."

But in order for that to happen, the National Park Service would have to agree -- and it doesn't. The NPS has effectively resisted the jury verdict, saying that allowing an exhumation would set a dangerous precedent that could lead to national monuments all over the country being dug up. The NPS is a formidable obstacle: One of Starrs' friends, who is also the former chief historian of the Park Service, warned him, "You'll never win. You're fighting the National Park Service."

Starrs, however, will not be deterred so easily. His zeal is evident the moment he begins to speak on the topic of Lewis' death. A scientist who has ventured into historians' territory, he believes his project has been held back by interdisciplinary warfare -- and has less than flattering things to say about historians. "I tend to side with Voltaire," Starrs says. "Voltaire said that 'God in all of his omnipotence can't change the past. That's why he created historians.'"

Stephen Ambrose may not hold similarly dismal views of scientists, but he thinks Starrs is sniffing around the wrong bones. Ambrose, a noted historian and the author of a bestselling 1996 biography of Lewis, "Undaunted Courage," believes that Starrs is simply misguided: He thinks the record clearly shows that Lewis died by his own hand, and he sees no value in an exhumation. In his book, Ambrose dismisses the venerable Lewis-was-murdered theory, stating tersely that the "literature is not convincing; the detailed refutation by [historian] Paul Russell Cutright is." In a recent New York Times Magazine article about the boom in forensic historical research headlined "Tabloid History," Ambrose lambasted Starrs' undertaking and even wrote to President Clinton on the matter. "What Starrs calls controversy, isn't," the article quotes that letter as reading. "Let him rest."

"Let the man rest?" Starrs replies incredulously. "Do you think he is resting, knowing that we are trying, desperately, to find, one way or the other, the truth of the matter?"

As for Ambrose, he is weary of the subject. "If they want to dig him up, they should dig him up," he says with exasperation. "I'm not going to object to it. I don't have any say in it. It's not my body ... The president knows what I think. The National Park Service knows what I think ... I've had my say."

Next Page: The rape of Beethoven's lock and other tales of forensic history

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