Lewis (1804-1806)

Lewis, Meriwether (1774-1809). The Travels of Capt. Lewis & Clarke, from St. Louis [...] to the Pacific Ocean; Performed in the Years 1804, 1805, & 1806 [...]. London: Longman, Hunt, Rees, and Orme, 1809.

The explorer Meriwether Lewis, born in Virginia in 1774, was the eldest son of a family belonging to the local elite. Raised in the countryside, he quickly became an excellent hunter; at a very early age he also showed natural talent for the arts and sciences.

Lewis enlisted in the regular army in 1795. During the following years, he was stationed in various places, notably at Fort Pickering (near Memphis), where he spent some time as commanding officer, and where he learned the language of the Chickasaw and got to know their way of life. In 1801 his childhood friend Thomas Jefferson was elected president of the United States and immediately employed Lewis as his private secretary. Lewis was Jefferson's assistant in the White House for two years, during which time the two men worked out a plan they had both been cherishing for a long while: to organize an expedition with the aim of finding a continental route to the Pacific Ocean. In January 1803 everything was ready; in asking Congress for the necessary subsidies, Jefferson recommended that Lewis be chosen to command the expedition, both for his previous services and his aptitudes and qualities, and insisted on his "fidelity to truth so scrupulous that whatever he should report would be as certain as seen by us." Congress approved the President's choice, and Lewis chose Lewis Clark as his second in command.

Since the plan was to first go up the Missouri to its source, Lewis assembled the members of the expedition near the mouth of the river in Illinois. The Lewis and Clark expedition set out in the spring of 1804, reached the Pacific after going down the Columbia River in 1805, and returned to Saint Louis in September 1806.

The following year Jefferson appointed Lewis governor of Louisiana. On October 11, 1809, Lewis died in an inn in central Tennessee while on his way to Washington. Even though Jefferson later suspected that Lewis had committed suicide, it seems more probable that he was killed. However this may be, his name remains attached to a feat that was unequalled except for Alexander Mackenzie's in 1792-1793.