WHAT WERE THEIR NAMES?

 

I can say she was a proud lady, although she carried no graceful lines and there was no poetry in her sweep. At three hundred fourteen feet she was longer than a foot ball field, but just thirty feet wide at the beam. She carried four 4 inch and one 3 inch gun, twelve mid ship torpedo tubes, a stern-mounted depth charge rack and assorted .50 caliber machine guns and small arms for her crew. 

Her four boilers fed two twenty-seven thousand horse power turbine engines driving two 9-foot screws which could send her one thousand one hundred and ninety tons and her one hundred and forty-nine human crewmembers slicing through the ocean waves at 35 knots. She was a ship of war, built to late for one and sacrificed at the very beginning of  the second.

She was born on April 2, 1919 on the covered ways of the New York Ship Building Corporation on the eastern shore of the Delaware River, across from Camden, New Jersey. It was then the largest shipyard in the world, employing 19,000 workers.

Miss Helen Strauss christened her as the “United States Ship Reuben James” just six months later, on October 4. Her namesake had been a member of the boarding party from the frigate USS Constitution, who shielded his injured captain’s body with his own. At the graving dock the James was outfitted with guns and superstructure. And on September 24, 1920 she was handed over to the U.S. Navy as DD #245, a four piper flush deck destroyer.The James’ first serious duty was to accompany the cruiser USS Olympia to Le Havre, France to escort home the remains of America’s Unknown Soldier from the Great War. Nineteen twenty-six found her off Nicaragua, cutting off weapons shipments to rebels. In 1932 she was patrolling off Cuba during the Batista coup. And in 1941 she was assigned to President Roosevelt’s “Neutrality Patrol”, which escorted convoys from Newfoundland to 26 degrees west, where British escorts took over.Begining in August the U.S. “Neutrality Patrols” sailed between Argentia, Newfoundland, and mid Atlantic, just at the limit of the James’ 375 ton fuel load. A refueling harbor was established in the shelter of the 18 mile long and 3 mile wide Hvalfjordur fjord just south of Reykjavík, where the James could pause after shepherding a convoy eastbound, and refuel to guard a deadheading convoy returning west.

It was a hard duty consisting of endless hours of mind numbing boredom, tossing in the fog shrouded North Atlantic, broken by unexpected moments of sheer terror. And the terror was real. On October 28, the destroyer Anderson (DD-411) while escorting convoy HX-156 dropped depth charges on a possible submarine contact. Her log reported a “considerable oil slick” observed after the attack. In the submarine war that was recorded as a “possible kill".

On October 30 the Reuben James, escorting the very same convoy, tracked a similar contact, detected by a sailor stationed below decks in the bow with a stethoscope pressed against the metal plating. It was a poor man’s sonar, used on ships built before such devices were even dreamed of, and before the Navy had the funds to install sonar systems in old hulls.

Having detected the suspected submarine the James made an attack run, and an “ash can” was rolled off the slanted rear rack. A metal flange on the rack was designed to catch the trigger of each depth charge and arm it just as it left the ship. The charge then sank to its assigned depth (in this case fifty feet) and exploded, hoping to crush the hull of a Nazi U-boat. But no oil slick was detected and the action was labeled as a “miss”. But it did leave an open a space on the rack. 

Rather than reload the heavy depth charges an inexperienced ensign ordered the crew to simply tie “safety forks” to the arming pins and retreat from the frigid bare deck. This improvisation was to have tragic affects in just a few hours, as the Reuben James approached 51 degrees 59' Latitude North, 27 degrees 5' Longitude West.

At 5:25 AM ship time, (8:25 hours GMT) a single torpedo struck the Reuben James on the port side about 200 feet from the bow. The six hundred sixty-one pound warhead vaporized the fire room, crumpled interior walls and sent a flash fire searching for anything to feed upon; furnishings or flesh. Almost instantly it found access to the forward powder room deep in the bowls of the James and in less time than it takes to suck in a breath it ignited the explosives stored there. In a great flash that split the Artic dawn the Reuben James was sundered in two. 

The 37 degree sea rushed in to fill the sudden vacuum. The integrity of the ship's water tight doors was overcome by the severity of her wound. Mercifully the forward section sank at once. Death came abruptly to over half the crew and all the ship’s officers but one as the bow went down. The stern section, being bigger, was able to float for a few moments.

About seventy-five crewmen in the stern managed to scramble onto life rafts or into life vests. As they hit the frigid water they were they were instantly coated in a three to six inch layer of fuel oil. They sucked the poisonous sludge into their lungs. What was worse, they swallowed it. And as the stern dipped beneath the waves the depth charges began to slide off their rack. The safety forks could not hold them at the increased angle, and the armed charges fell free, one after the other, each to explode in their turn at fifty feet down. The carnage amongst the men struggling in the water was horrible.

Less than five minutes after being struck the only thing left of the Reuben James was forty-four men struggling to stay afloat in freezing waters. 

For a few brief weeks they were heroes . 

But within five weeks their sacrifice was transformed into merely the first of a hundred thousand such sacrifices.

The 115 dead from the Reuben James were the first Americans killed in World War II, 37 days before Pearl Harbor, on the Halloween dawn, 1941. 

“Well, many years have passed since those brave men are gone, and those cold icy waters are still and they’re calm. Many years have passed, but still I wonder why, the worst of men must fight but the best of men must die. Tell me, what were their names, tell me, what were their names? Did you have a friend on the good Reuben James?”(Woody Guthrie)

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AMERICAN MURDER Part Eight

 

I said at the beginning that I don't believe Priscilla Grinder. She claims that about 3:00am  (or “the middle of the night”) she heard a shot. She heard a man call, “Oh, Lord”. Then she heard a second shot. Then, sometime later she heard a scratching at the door of the kitchen cabin, where she and her two little girls were sleeping. Then she heard her guest Meriwether Lewis pleading for water. She said she did not open the door, but she knew it was Lewis because she peeked through the open chinks in the wall and saw him wandering between the cabins.

According to the U.S. Naval Observatory, on the night of 10/11 October, 1809,  there was a new moon. This meant there was no light to illuminate Lewis for Priscilla Grinder to see him. Was Lewis carrying a candle or a lamp? If so Priscilla did not mention it. And any light inside the cabin would have blinded her to anyone moving around outside in the dark.

Worse was the improved version Priscilla told thirty years later, in 1839. This time, she said, "About dark two or three other men rode up and called for lodging. Mr. Lewis immediately drew a brace of pistols, stepped towards them and challenged them to fight a duel. They,. not liking this salutation, rode on to the next house, five miles." Now why would Lewis pick a fight when outnumbered? And why did neither servant in the barn cabin hear this confrontation? 

The only thing we know with any certainty  is that someone shot Governor Meriwether Lewis that night, allegedly once in the head and once in the side, and the pool of suspects is pretty shallow.

Major General Wilkinson might have dispatched agents to murder Governor Lewis. But why not waylay him while he was camped in the wilderness?  And how could they expect to recognize him in an age before photographs?  Also, remember, Grinder's Stand was suffering a loss of business because of the toll road by-pass. How would an assassin even know Lewis had stopped at Grinder's Stand?  

There were also  highwaymen men along The Trace - whites and Indians. They would have been interested in the five or six horses Lewis' party rode on - worth about $25 each - about $2,000 today.  But come the dawn, the none of the hobbled horses were missing.

If we eliminate, at least for the time being, these unlikely suspects, we are left with the four adults who were at Grinder's Stand that night - Priscilla Grinder, Lewis' servant John Pernier and James Neeley's servant, and Lewis himself. There was also Priscilla's husband Robert, but if he had been present why did neither John Prenier or Neeley's servant mention him, then or later? No, Robert Grinder also fails as a suspect. 

Now, John Pernier was described as a “free mulatto”, meaning he had “negro blood”. Given the racism of the age, and the elitism of Lewis' Virginia heritage, no one asked Pernier to write down his version of what happened that night.   

But Pernier did share his story of that night with Meriwether Lewis' mother Lucy Marks (above),  and her reaction was to accuse him of killing her son. And Pernier cannot be ruled out as the shooter. But he died just 5 months later, in April of 1810, of an apparent suicide through an overdose of Laudlum. But  he neither said nor left any indication he killed himself because of guilt about killing Lewis.  More likely he felt guilty because of his failure to save Louis.     

As to Jame's Neeley's servant, we don't know his name or age or his version of events. However I suspect that James Neeley's letter detailing Lewis' death to President Thomas Jefferson was based in part  on what this man or boy  told him about that night.  And it seems likely we can eliminate both servants as possible shooters because either one could have easily implicated the other, but neither did.

Priscilla Grinder must have had at least one weapon to defend herself and her daughters, else her husband would never have left her alone.  Her weapon was probably a blunderbuss (above), also called a “coach gun”,  a muzzle loading shotgun with a short barrel and relatively lite in weight. They were a superb weapon for intimidation and required no marksmanship. They fired a hand full of lead balls, but could also be loaded with whatever metal or stones were within reach. 

Priscilla was probably proficient as well with a musket or her own pistol. Self defense is one of the skills required for running a small business in a rough neighborhood. 

We know that Governor Lewis himself (above) had four weapons. He had a hunting knife and a smooth bore flintlock musket. The size of the long gun ( about 5') makes it impossible that Lewis shot himself in the head with this gun, then reloaded and shot himself a second time.

But Lewis also had a “brace” of pistols, meaning two. The ones he was most likely carrying were called “horse pistols” because they were too large (9 inches long) and too heavy (three pounds each) to wear in your belt. These fired the same .69 caliber lead ball as the long rifle, with a muzzle velocities of about 600 feet per second. If Governor Lewis shot himself, he used the horse pistols, which would account for the two shots Priscilla supposedly heard. Of all the possible assassins of Meriwether Lewis, the most likely was Meriwether Lewis.

According to modern multi-cultural studies, although suicide can affect anyone, those at the greatest risk are single white males from an affluent background who are moderate alcoholics and/or drug abusers, with few friends, and who are also dealing with a health problem while suffering from a diagnosable mental-health disorder such as depression. Emile Durkheim, the Frenchman who established the field of Sociology, described this condition as “excessive individuation”. Applying this description, Meriwether Lewis was the poster child for suicide.

I wish we had John Prenier's version of events that night. I wish experts could exhume Governor Lewis' body, to determine exactly what his wounds were. But honestly, I do not think either of those missing pieces of evidence are likely to ever be supplied. So we are left with the death of a man who was far from perfect even when judged by the standards of his own time, but who was still more than an American hero. Meriwether Lewis was an American Archetype, even in his mode of death - self murder.

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AMERICAN MURDER Part Seven

 

I must say the last two weeks of Meriwether Lewis' life were very hard. On Friday Morning, 6 October 1809, the Governor and Indian agent James Neeley, along with their two servants, left the primary Chickasaw village before dawn, heading north along the Natchez Trace. They reached Bear Creek that first day. On the next day they reached the Tennessee River, at Corbert's Ferry.

George Colbert was described by the whites who had to deal with him as both “shrewd, talented and wicked” and as an artful and a designing river pirate. This half-Scot, half-Chickasaw Indian had a monopoly on crossing the wide Tennessee River for fifty miles in either direction. And he charged for his ferry accordingly – usually fifty cents per man or horse, (a dollar for a man on a horse) and whenever possible, more.

His two story wood frame home (above), which stood above the ferry, was described as a “country palace” by travelers used to a hut or a lean-too. It was also known in the environs as the Buzzard's Roost. From this house, George oversaw the 100 slaves who worked his plantation. George Colbert explained his worldview this way, “Indians never know how to steal until white man learned them...We are free and we intend to keep so.”

The standard tale is that having paid their fees for a ten minute boat ride across the river, Lewis and Neeley (et al) stumbled on to camp that night along the Sweet Water Branch of Rock Creek. They awoke on Monday, 9 October and returned to the trail, described as a “snake-infested, mosquito-beset, robber-haunted, Indian-pestered forest path." At the end of the day they reached the attractively titled Dogwood Mud-hole and camped out for another chilly fall night. Sometime after midnight a rain storm rumbled through and the campers were soaked. 

When the men climbed out from under their wet blankets on the morning of Tuesday, 10 October, it was still raining and colder. And, they discovered,  said Neeley, that two of their horses had wandered off during the night. So while the servants and Neeley stayed behind to recapture the horses, Lewis continued up the trail alone. But I have a few questions about all of that.

If you believe what Neeley wrote later to Thomas Jefferson, he stayed behind on the morning of ten October  to help search for the missing horses. But both servants showed up later that day with the those horses, while Neeley was still unaccounted for.  And according to court records from Franklin, Tennessee, on 11 October, 1809, James Neely was in a courtroom, signing a promissory note to repay a loan. That courtroom was at least three days travel from Lewis' campsite on the morning of the tenth. The only conclusion I can come to, is that James Neeley was not with Governor Meriwether Lewis on that Tuesday morning.

It seems to me that the lex parsimonoae - AKA Occam's Razor - of the situation is that shortly after the party crossed the Tennessee River on the afternoon of Sunday, 8 October, James Neeley rode ahead on his own, racing to meet his court date, leaving his own servant behind to help Lewis. But I suspect that Neeley did not want President Thomas Jefferson to know that he was being sued over a debt, nor did he want the President to know he had abandoned the ailing Meriwether Lewis on the Trace, after assuring Captain Russell at Fort Pickering that he would keep a close watch over Lewis. This little scrap of dirty linen seems embarrassing enough to have inspired Neeley's lies about where he was on the night of the 10/11 October,  particularly considering future events.

This is a much simpler explanation than any of the convoluted conspiracy threads that some have weaved around the last 24 hours of Meriwether Lewis' life. This simple explanation requires only that people act like people you know, that they lie for small and petty reasons a lot more often than they lie for big complicated ones. And they disguise their small lies much more badly. But. of course, this explanation also leads us to a few more questions.

Sometime around 5:30 on the evening of 10 October, 1809 Priscilla Grinder saw a lone rider approaching the three split rail, un-chinked and un-plastered cabins of "Grinder's Stand".  She immediately sent her two daughters to the kitchen cabin, a few steps behind the others. And only then did she step outside to greet the traveler.

He was a tall and athletic man who wore a blue and white striped and faded “duster”, and he was accompanied by a dog. Their first meeting, as were most meetings along The Trace, was wary.  Each party inspected the other for mutilations, cropped ears, missing fingers or branded flesh. It was common practice at the time for suspected thieves to be so marked as a warning for potential future victims. But as far as we know, Priscilla bore no such marks. And we know Lewis did not. But both of them would have been armed.

Meriwether asked if he could receive an evening's lodging and a meal. Priscilla said yes, and asked if he were traveling alone. Lewis explained his servants would be arriving shortly. There was no mention of Neeley in her story. He dismounted and removed his saddle. He hobbled his horse, and carried the saddle inside the cabin. 

He asked for a drink, but did not seem interested in it after he was served. It is possible that the beverage, probably the same corn mash Priscilla's husband was selling to the Chickasaw, had little appeal for a man who had tasted wine at Thomas Jefferson's table.

A few minutes later two more men rode up. Lewis identified them as his servants, even though only one, John Pernier, actually was. The other was Neeley's man. Lewis asked Pernier to fetch some gunpowder, saying he had a canister of it somewhere in his luggage. Priscilla did not hear the reply, as she had to go out to the kitchen cabin to begin preparing the meal for the three men. Still, there is no indication that Lewis identified himself to his host.

After the meal had been served, Pernier and Neeley's man took the horses off to the other cabin, used as a barn. All three men would bed there for the night. Priscilla said later that as she gathered up the dishes, Lewis began to intensely pace up and down the room. According to her, “Sometimes he would seem as if he were walking up to me, and would suddenly wheel round, and walk back as fast as he could.” Then he stopped, produced his pipe and lighted it, pulled a chair close to the front door of the cabin and announced, “What a sweet evening it is.”

It smacks me as an unlikely comment from a man who had been soaked to the skin for the last twelve hours. But then as I said at the very beginning, I don't trust the stories this lady has to tell about the last night of Meriwether Lewis' life. 

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