The Broken Column

Meriwether Lewis, thirty-five years old and governor of Upper Louisiana, stopped for the night at Grinder's Stand on 10 October 1809, riding east with his expedition journals and a set of contested accounts to answer for. He was shot twice, in the head and in the body, and died at sunrise the next morning. Priscilla Grinder, the innkeeper's wife, is the only source for the hours between Lewis going to his room and the shots, and her account reaches us three times between 1809 and 1839, the last of them a different story altogether. Lewis's servant John Pernier was in the room as he died and told Jefferson about it in person. Not a word of what he said was written down. Thomas Jefferson, who had known him since he was a boy, wrote plainly that he had died by his own hand. Lewis's family never accepted it. He had crossed the continent and come back four years earlier.

In 1848 the State of Tennessee appointed a committee, opened the grave far enough to be certain of him, and built a monument over it where it lay: a broken column, the century's standard emblem for a life cut off early. The committee's report went the other way from Jefferson. It seemed to them more probable, they wrote, that he died by the hands of an assassin. A writer for Everybody's Magazine found the place in 1905 standing in brush with its iron railing gone, taken in the Civil War for horseshoes by local account. The cemetery around him came afterwards, in 1849, when a neighbour gave an acre for one. The settlers gathered around Lewis, not the other way about.