AMERICAN MURDER Part Four

 

I think the breaking point for Governor Meriwether Lewis (above) came when the Federal Government denied the bill he submitted for translating the territorial laws into French - in a place where, until 1803, French was the official language. It was only $18. And even in 1808 that was not much money – it would be about $245 today. But it was just another example of the penny pinching of the bean counters in the administration of the new President James Madison.

The politicians were never very kind to Meriwether Lewis. For risking his life and limbs in the wilderness for three long years, for being shot, for repeatedly almost starving to death and almost drowning several times, when he got back alive the Captain received $1,228 in back pay (equal to about $16,000 today) and a coupon good for 1,600 acres of Federal land. (The official price of which was just $2 an acre – so the equivalent of another $3,000.) Added to this would be his yearly budget/salary  as Governor of $2,000, ($26,000 today), out of which he had to draw all incidental expenses, from which was now deducted that $18. So that was just another kick in the behind.

During their return voyage in 1806, Lewis and Clark had invited the Manndan Chief White Coyote to visit President Jefferson in Washington, and the chief had impulsively agreed. Jefferson was delighted, and the visit had cemented relations with the strongest tribe in the middle Missouri River country. But it proved difficult to get White Coyote and his entourage back home.

An attempt in 1807 had been turned back by the Arikarass tribe, at cost of the lives of three soldiers and the leg of a fourth man. More soldiers would have to be dispatched and bribes paid to allow the chief and his family to get home. But the price tag of this diplomatic mercy mission had risen to $7,000. The Washington bean counters were appalled. And they sort of had a point.

Lewis had handed the problem over to the St. Louis-Missouri River Fur Company, a private enterprise corporation. One hundred fifty men had marched and paddled up the Missouri River to the Manndan villages. They had returned the chief, and had then continued on, trapping beaver, otter and bear. All the pelts were shipped back to the company warehouse in St. Louis. The profits had gone to the shareholders, but the bill for paying all those men to pole their way up the Missouri River had gone to the Government. Sound familiar? And two of the shareholders in the St. Louis Fur Company were Governor Meriwether Lewis and his brother Reuben Lewis.

These details had been pointed out to the bureaucrats in Washington by the priggish Frederick Bates,   (above). The result was that the Madison administration, which had not picked Lewis,  had begun going over the Governor's expenses with a fine tooth comb. They grudgingly paid most of the bill for White Coyote's return, but managed to find $940 they could refuse to reimburse to Lewis. That was almost half his yearly budget and salary! 

Worse still, the Madison administration had re-opened the books on the three year old Lewis and Clark Expedition, and were now demanding a detailed accounting as to why a expedition projected to cost  $2,500 had ended up costing $40,000. The biggest reasons was, of course, that an enthusiastic congress, at Jefferson's urging, had added those land grants for everybody. But the Madison administration had suddenly developed amnesia about that.

The reality was that the land grants had not cost the government a dime, except in the accounting ledgers of the bean counters. But over the summer it took a month for one of the bureaucrats' demands for more paperwork to travel from Washington to St. Louis, and at least another month for Governor Lewis to respond. In the winter there was no mail at all, and for months at a time the misconstructions and misunderstandings simply piled one atop the next. It was a system made for bureaucratic misunderstandings, and the denial of an $18 translating fee was just the final straw. Meriwether Lewis, Governor of the Territory, must return to Washington and make his case face-to-face with the Federal bean counters.

In mid-August of 1809 Meriwether Lewis signed papers granting William Clark and two other friends Power-of-Attorney, in case anything should happen to him on his trip back east. It was a standard precaution, like buying flight insurance in the 21st century.  Lewis also sent a letter off to the Secretary of War protesting his treatment, and a letter to his mother, saying he was looking forward to seeing her in Virginia.  None of these were the actions of man who did not expect to return.

The St. Louis Gazette reported on Monday, 4 September, 1809 that Lewis had left town “in good health”. aboard a "Kentucky Ark", usually a twelve foot wide and thirty feet long flatboat which floated clumsily down the Mississippi.  Lewis was bound for New Orleans, where he intended upon boarding a sailing ship for the long voyage around the isthmus of Spanish Florida to Washington. But September was probably the worst time to be traveling by river in America.  And that September in particular.

It was the dry season of a dry year. The river was low, and the flatboat grounded methodically on every sand bar. It was brutally hot, the mosquito population feasted on every inch of bare flesh, and Lewis suffered a relapse of the malaria he had contracted during the transcontinental expedition.

After a week of travel, 180 river miles downriver, his flatboat arrived at the outpost of New Madrid.

This village of 800 had been a border town for a hundred years, first dividing Spanish territory from French territory, then between English and Spanish, then Spanish and American. Since 1803, it marked the border between Lewis' own Northern Louisiana Territory and the territory of Southern Louisiana, run from New Orleans. Governor Lewis was now under the authority of Governor and General James Wilkinson.

And from the moment he had landed at New Madrid (above), Lewis' behavior changed. His plans changed as well. It almost seems as if  Governor Meriwether Lewis clearly felt uncomfortable staying here while incapacitated by his fever, and allowed himself just two days to recuperate. On Wednesday, 13 September, he order his boat to shove off again.

Two days later the boat put in at the fourth of the Chickasaw Bluffs (and the future site of Memphis) at Fort Pickering.  Here Governor Lewis was carried off the river on a stretcher, badly dehydrated from his malaria fevers. He was met by Captain Gilbert Russel, commander of the sixteen man outpost. 

Captain Russel immediately turned over his own bed to the Governor, but was Lewis really so sick he could not continue the boat trip to New Orleans? Was he crazed by illness to the point of paranoia? Whatever the truth, the moment he had landed at New Madrid, Lewis' behavior had changed again. His plans certainly did. It almost seems that Governor Meriwether Lewis now thought of himself as being behind enemy lines.

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AMERICAN MURDER Part Three

 

I am amazed that to the 7 million people living in the United States in 1810, the old adage that "The one thing they are not making more of is land", was not true.  Ignoring for the moment that it was actually being stolen from the native peoples, the vast surplus of a commodity rare in Europe should have been the dominant economic reality in Meriwether Lewis' world. And yet, curiously, land prices remained extremely  high.

The reason was Alexander Hamilton's great compromise. He exchanged establishing the Federal Capital between Virginia and Maryland, two states which had little debt,  for allowing the Federal Government to take over all the other states' debts. This put the American economy on a solid financial footing.  But the downside was Hamilton meant to pay off the debts by selling unclaimed land as quickly as possible, 

Because of that decision, as Donald Holtgrieve explained in 1975,  "...over one-half of the land disposed of by the federal government in the history of this country went through the hands of professional land dealers before it was occupied.”

What this meant for early America was noted by Krout and Fox in their seminal 1944 book, “The Completion of Independence”. “The price of farmland, except near cities, averaged between ten and fifteen dollars per acre..." The values of actual sales were in direct contrast with the official price, set in 1795 at a mere $2 an acre. But those official bargains were only available in parcels of 320 acre lots."

And as was, again, noted in “The Completion...” “The common Carey Plow (above) was made entirely of wood, save for an iron collar to cut the sod...With such an implement an acre was a good days work." In other words, any farm over forty acres was simply of no use to a family depending upon farming for its livelihood.

The only ones who could afford to buy in the Federal auctions were wealthy speculators and corporations of speculators, who re-surveyed and subdivided the land, and then re-sold it to smaller speculators, who re-surveyed and re-sold it to, eventually, actual farmers. And at each resale the price went up.

The Yeoman farmer might be celebrated in myth, but in reality they were at the bottom of a profit pyramid, paying as much as 40% interest on the loans to buy their farms. "Farmers were thus forced to grow (not food for their own tables, but ) cash crops like tobacco or cotton, to pay their debts.” And even if, “...a farmer who found a desired piece of land,  became a squatter by clearing and planting it with the hope of one day purchasing the acres he had improved... when the cleared lands went up for auction, a speculator could out-bid the squatter....”  And usually did.

George Washington was a speculator, as was Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Andrew Jackson and Meriwether Lewis. And none of these leaders were above hiring thugs to drive squatters off “their” land.  It was the speculators who drove Abraham Lincoln's father off his farm in Kentucky, and again off his farm in Indiana and eventually drove him to Illinois, where Abraham gave up farming entirely. 

As another source writing about this unromantic American frontier points out, “As a consequence of monopolistic tactics and official fraud, northern Alabama lands were overwhelmingly engrossed by absentee speculators and wealthy settler elites.”  The leveling process of the American frontier was largely a myth, created by the wealthy in a natural effort to romanticize their own past. On the frontier, as in the Eastern cities, money talked. America did not have to be settled in this fashion. But it was.

The image was that everyone seemed to be getting rich in land speculation. But the reality was that a majority of speculators lost money. And the farther you were down the food chain from the original government auction, the less chance you had to see a profit. Like the stock market bubbles of later generations, those drawn into the land market bubbles had to quickly sell at profit or they went broke. That drove the prices up, which made the almost unlimited American lands, painfully expensive. As it was in 2000, so it was in 1800; the only guarantee of a profit was to be a banker, or to have one as a partner.

It was this reality which faced Governor Meriwether Lewis as he first stepped onto the docks of St. Louis.

Lewis did two things immediately which almost assured he would be a failure as a Governor. First he announced that should he be out of the territory for any reason, then his old comrade William Clark (whom Jefferson had named the Indian Agent for the upper Louisiana Territory) would serve as acting Governor. This made sense to Governor Lewis because he was new to the territory and he knew and could trust Clark. 

But it was also a disaster, because Frederick Bates was the Lieutenant Governor, and had been the acting Governor for almost a year while Lewis had slowly made his way west.  Bates was, officially,  the man who was legally required to be the acting Governor should Lewis be out of the territory. And it was Bates who had already filled the government offices before Lewis arrived, making the power structure loyal to the junior officer.  So naming Clark as acting Governor was an insult Lewis was not required to deliver and probably had not intended upon making.  But from that moment forward Fredrick Bates was Lewis' sworn enemy. He would prove to be an effective opponent - for Frederick Bates was a very good at being an unpleasant man.

As Bates wrote to his brother, “My habits are pacific. Yet I have had acrimonious differences with almost every person with whom (I) have been associated in public business…But before God I cannot acknowledge that I have been blamable in one instance.” And he never would admit it.

A few weeks later, Bates (above) related how he was getting along with Lewis. “Sometime after this there was a ball in St. Louis, I attended early, and was seated in conversation with some gentlemen when the Governor entered. He drew his chair close to mine – there was a pause in the conversation – I availed myself of it – arose and walked to the opposite side of the room...He knew my resolution not to speak to him except on business, and he ought not to have thrust himself in my way.”

And these two men now found themselves in charge of dispensing millions of acres of land to the hundreds of speculators who had flocked to St. Louis to avail themselves of the bounty. And there were natural resources to be exploited, lead and tin mines just discovered beneath the rolling Louisiana territory (below). With that much profit to be made, such a pair of offended egos did not portend a profitable future for any one not skilled at bureaucratic infighting. such as Meriwether Lewis.

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AMERICAN MURDER Part Two

 

I think it's clear that Meriwether Lewis (above) was, at 35, an American hero. He had been the official leader of the 6,000 mile long Lewis and Clark expedition.  On his return in 1807,  President Thomas Jefferson named him the governor of the Upper Louisiana Territory, it's capital in St. Louis.  But just two years later he was dead, in an isolated hostel just north over the border between modern day Mississippi and Tennessee, shot twice and with knife cuts across his throat.

Before the march to the Pacific Ocean, before he even served as the personal aide to the President, Lewis exhibited all the indications of suffering with Asperger syndrome. He was socially inept, a painfully shy, solitary man, “touchy, opinionated, and quarrelsome”.  Making friends was difficult for him, and he had the sorry capability of turning first-time acquaintances into  lifelong enemies. 

And then there was the Lewis and Clark expedition, the greatest achievement of Merriweather's life. But it had cost the Virginian more than was generally appreciated. While on this three year adventure, not only had he repeatedly starved, he had been frozen, and several times nearly drowned, he had also been shot by one of his own men (by accident).  And he had probably contracted syphilis.

There is no unambiguous proof of this last affliction, of course. But the average incubation period for syphilis is about 21 days. And, “Six to eight weeks after the initial sore disappears the patient will feel tired, may experience a headache with a fever, have swollen lymph nodes and a sore throat.... hair loss and a skin rash...These symptoms can last for over three months, and sometimes as long as six months.”

We know from the private journals kept by its members, that on 13 and 14  August of 1805 Captain Lewis and some of the men from the expedition ‘partied’ with some Shoshone women -  just another part of the destruction of tribal coherence. Twenty-eight days later, on 19 September,  Meriwether Lewis became so ill he stopped writing in his diary for three months. And when the expedition returned to St. Louis in late September of 1806, they tarried there for six weeks without any reasonable explanation.

Today an infection of syphilis would be treated with a course of antibiotics. But in the 19^th century the standard was a month's treatment with the poisonous metal mercury -  taken either orally, applied as a balm, breathing in the vapors, or by a direct injection. Physicians at the time can be forgiven for thinking mercury could cure syphilis because in the normal course of the disease, the symptoms disappear and then reappear at random, perhaps with years between outbreaks. 

But even more misleading was that the symptoms of mercury poisoning – numbness and pins-and-needles in the hands and feet, loss of coordination, muscle weakness, mood swings, memory loss,  impairment of speech and hearing and mental disturbance- are the same symptoms as advancing syphilis. It is not merely a case of the cure being worse than the disease. In this case, the cure reinforced the disease.

In March of 1807,  after that month long delay in St. Louis,  Captain Lewis finally reported to the President in Washington, D.C.   Jefferson then appointed his ex-neighbor to the governorship of the Upper Louisiana Territory.  Then he released Lewis to visit with his family in Virginia, and prepare his journals for publication.

Then, unexpectedly, President Jefferson added to Captain Lewis’ burden. He asked him to go to Richmond to attend the trial of that lightning rod of American politics, Aaron Burr.

Burr (above) was, depending on whom you choose to believe, either a hero seeking to strike a blow against the Spanish empire, or he was a traitor who had raised a small army to foster rebellion within the United States. Jefferson chose to believe the latter because he already hated Burr. 

After Burr was acquitted, Meriwether Lewis returned to his mother’s home,  not far from Jefferson’s home at Monticello. He wrote to a Philadelphia friend, Mahlon Dickerson, in early November, “What may be my next adventure, God knows, but on this I am determined, to get a wife.” Many women were interviewed for the job, in Virginia and Philadelphia and even Cincinnati, but none were willing to move with Lewis to the distant frontier, even as a Governor's wife. Meriwether's relations with women were as clumsy and difficult as his relations with men.

By late November the still single Meriwether and his brother Reuben had arrived at the falls of the Ohio River (above), where the town of Louisville, Kentucky had been established. There Lewis hired Joseph Charles to run the newspaper he intended upon starting in St. Louis, and in early January 1808 he advertised for subscribers at $3 a year. It was a shrewd political move, making certain his side of political events would be publicize, and was probably suggested by Jefferson who had a history of using newspapers to attack his political opponents.

Lewis would need all the the support he could muster, because in St. Louis (above) he was walking into a den of thieves as treacherous as the one in Washington, D.C,

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AMERICAN MURDER Part One

 

I won't call the lady a liar, but I don't believe any of the stories Priscilla Grinder told about that night - that she heard two gunshots shatter the early morning darkness, heard her guest begging for help and never peeked out her door. I can not say exactly what occurred that pitiless night. But maybe it was murder.

Grinder's Stand, as it was called, stood along the ridge route called the Natchez Trace or “The Devil's Backbone”. The road - to give it a generous title - began where the first high ground above New Orleans, touched the Mississippi River, at a human den of inequity called Natchez. 

Following ancient buffalo trails "The Trace" then meandered through a dense macabre forests 445 miles, twenty days by horse and foot, to Nashville, Tennessee, where it joined Daniel Boone's Wilderness Road heading to the east. Under the progressive President Thomas Jefferson, the U.S. Army was set to work clearing the trace to 8 feet wide and removing all tree stumps above 16 inches tall, so "The Trace" could be used by high riding Conestoga wagons. But each stream and river still had to be forded, even if the traveler could afford to pay a toll along those short parallel sections improved even more by local entrepreneurs.

In 1802, when Louisiana was still French territory, the customs house in Natchez reported a million dollars worth of tobacco, flower, hemp, cider and whiskey on its way down the Mississippi to New Orleans. By 1804, after the Louisiana Purchase, "The Trace" saw as many as 1,000 travelers a year -  the crews of flatboats and rafts returning home on foot with their profits. 

Where there are profits, there are those who would steal them. Each ominous river and stream crossing on "The Trace" was reputed to be the unmarked graves of boatmen who had been set upon by gangs of “Land Pirates”. There was no law on "The Trace".  And while the level of violence never approached the legends, meeting a group of strangers at an isolated ford or forest clearing, or blind turning in the trail was still an unnerving experience.

Robert Evans Grinder and Priscilla Knight were each born within sight of Moore's knob (above, BG)), the 1,700 foot high granite mountain that looms over Stokes county, North Carolina. As teenagers they ran away together, and in 1799 were married in Nashville, about the time their daughter, Parthenia, was born. They were living examples of the new nation, young, illiterate, hard working and hungry to succeed.

So as the soldiers hacked and sawed their way south along "The Trace", the Grinder's followed. And in 1807 they came to the Tennessee “Barins”, high ground between the Duck and Tennessee Rivers, sixty miles southwest of Nashville. Here the Grinders enlarged and hacked out a couple of clearings amidst the oaks and dogwoods. Back in the woods they planted corn and rye. And in a clearing along the trace they built a small one room cabin, and an adjoining barn with a small stable. 

The cabin and barn stood at right angles to each other, their front doors opening on a common space.  A third building close by served as the detached kitchen. In 1807 these three structures served as Grinder's Stand, one of only seven such “Stands” or way stations along The Trace, where for thirty cents you could rent a bed or part of a bed or just a roof for the night. 

For a few cents more Priscilla could supply a bowl of warm gruel. And it was a successful business, until a toll road by-pass opened, and the Grinder's income dropped off. So the Grinders depended on their fallback industry, selling corn mash whiskey to the Chickasaw Indians, whose nation's border lay just a few yards beyond Grinder's Stand's front door.

In the rainy dusk of 10 October, 1809, this failing wilderness hostel was unexpectedly confronted by a tall, gaunt man who materialized out of the woods.  Priscilla Grinder, alone with her children,  must have greeted him warily. Why was this man in an expensive blue and white stripped duster, traveling alone? Why had he not taken the bypass when he could obviously afford it?  

According to Priscilla, he tried to set her mind at ease by telling her that his two servants should be arriving shortly with pack animals. But that only added to the mystery. And if she had known her weary visitor was Merriweather Lewis (above), Governor of Upper Louisiana Territory  and one of the most famous men in North America, it likely would not have eased her mind .  In God's name, why was such a man stopping at her door, seeking the sad comforts which she could offer?  It was a question still waiting for an answer, 300 years later.

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