Friday, October 5, 2018

Today was truly our last stop on the Lewis and Clark National Historic Trail!  

Today's Plans:
We intended today to drive to Hohenwald, TN to visit the Meriwether Lewis Monument and Grave site as well as set up camp in Goodlettsville, TN.

Today's Travels:
We left our Sikesville, MO camp early this AM at 7:45am and temps of 70degrees.  We read some "sketchy" reviews about the camp on Thursday PM, so we said, "goodbye" early.

We drove through the cities of Jackson, TN, Lexington, TN, over the Mississippi River and drove past hundreds of acres of cotton and soybean fields.  We observed many round cotton bales harvested and ready to be loaded on trailers.  We rode over the Tennessee River and worked our way south east to the small town of Hohenwald, TN, on the Natchez Trace.  

Notice the broken column which symbolizes Lewis' untimely
death. Placed here by Missouri in 1848.

Lewis Monument as well as Natchez Trace markers
which go from bottom left towards the left of the
monument.

Grinders Inn Reproduction (left) as well as the
Natchez Trace (right)

Natchez Trace National Historic Trail
Griners (Grinders) Inn was a stop along the Natchez Trace and this was where Lewis found himself on the night of October 11th, at the Grinders Stand Inn.  He had tried to kill himself twice on the steamboat down the Mississippi. He got off in Memphis, TN (after an Army officer felt he was healthy enough), then went by foot on the Natchez Trace, an old military and commerce road from Nashville, TN to Natchez, MS.

The plaque reads, "Grinder House. Site and ruins of the
Grinder House in which Meriwether Lewis Met His Death
on the Night of October 11, 1809"
I'm pointing to the probable location of the house where
Lewis shot himself, literally standing on the original
foundation of the kitchen chimney.

He was in the company of Lewis' free black servant, John Pernier and a rather shady and irresponsible Chickasaw Indian agent named James Neelly. The two of them were to watch Lewis carefully as he was making his way to Washington DC with his precious Corps of Discovery Journals and expense accounts. They wre to keep him away from alcohol and "powder." (powder and ball for the pistols Lewis was carrying since he was heavily armed).

 A large number of these "credit charges" Lewis made on the way West and East 1803-1806 were being challenged by the Madison Administration's Washington DC  bureaucrats.  He was undoubtedly in a

 
troubled state, was taking opiods for his malaria, was probably "poisoned" (along with the entire Corps of Discovery with Dr. Rush's "thunderclapper pills" made of mercury), was drinking heavily and had a family predisposition to "melancholy," as depression was called in those early years. 

Grinder House Reproduction with "dogtrot" walkway in
between the two houses.

While the three of them camped from Memphis, TN up the Trail, a few of their horses ran off. Pernier and Neelly went to get them and Lewis went on ahead alone to the Grinders Inn.  You can see by the picture of the reproduction dogtrot house that there are two separate houses, covered by a roof.  Mrs. Grinder felt Lewis was in a disturbed state and gave him the room across the "dogtrot" as they called it and she slept in the other house with her children.  

She heard two shots in the night and saw Lewis stagger out of the door and loudly call out for water. She and her children were too terrified to go outside to offer any help and by dawn the next day when Pernier and Neelly came to the Inn, Lewis was dead with two gunshot wounds, one to the head and the other to the abdomen.

This display does a good job telling about Lewis' plans and
route to Washington. He planned to go by water down the
Mississippi, through the Gulf of Mexico, around Florida,
up the Atlantic coast to Washington, DC. But he decided to
take the land route to Memphis, then up the Natchez Trace.

National Park Service Natchez Trace Meriwether Lewis Monument
We took pictures of his grave/monument as well as talked to NPS guides inside the reproduction house and the small museum inside.  Natchez Trace is an historic road 1790 to 1840 and the Grinders Inn was only one of many stops along the Trace.  Grinders was a dogtrot house, a breezeway connecting two separate buildings.  We spent an hour walking around and taking pics and talking to the guide.

We then drove for 40+ miles on the Natchez Trace Parkway, through winding 2 lane roads with hardwood trees all beginning to turn brown and yellow.  Funny that we saw few evergreens now.  It was quite beautiful.  We rode through Franklin, TN and arrived at our Nashville North KOA in Goodlettsville, TN at 3:30 to hot, humid sunny weather, 90degrees.


Our Visits to Both Men
We visited the birthplaces and final resting sites of both
-Meriwether Lewis (b. August 18, 1774 near Charlottesville, VA. d. October 11, 1809, 35 years) He is buried here in Hohenwald, TN along the Natchez Trace.  His mother believed he was murdered but former President Thomas Jefferson and his good friend and Co-Captain William Clark all believed Lewis took his own life.

-William Clark (b. August 1, 1770 Ladysmith, VA, d. September 1, 1838, 68 years). He is buried in Bellefontaine Cemetery St. Louis, MO. Members of the Shoshone, Osage and Mandan Indian Tribes spoke at the 2004 Bicentenial ceremony rededicating Clark's monument and the Corps departure from St. Charles, MO and marking Clark's service to these nations during the final years of his life. 

These were truly heroic men of the times and of of American and world history.  

Finally, Thomas Jefferson's tribute to his "adopted son," a fellow Virginian plantation owner and gentry, his personal Presidential Secretary, a US Army soldier and the man appointed to lead the most famous exploratory expedition in American history was as follows: 

"His courage was undaunted; His firmness and perseverance yielded to nothing but impossibilities; a rigid disciplinarian, yet tender as a father of those committed to his charge; honest, disinterested, liberal, with a sound understanding and a scrupulous fidelity to truth."