Snowbound and Eclipse
Page 54
“Do you believe a man could do that?”
Pernia nodded. “In his condition, General, he would do anything he had to do.”
“Where was Major Neelly?”
“He came up in the morning, sir. Maybe an hour or two after dawn.”
“That’s a strange hour. Was he present when the governor died?”
“Yes, sir. But it be too late. The governor is breathing his last.”
“Did he have the missing horses?”
Pernia nodded. “He found one, his own, but not the other, and came up.”
“How could he travel at night?”
“I didn’t ask him, sir. It wasn’t so dark. He maybe rode early, by moon, to catch up and press on.”
“Then he was not far off at dawn. Is there the slightest chance that the major shot the governor?”
“No, sir, not as I know. The governor cut his arms to finish the dying. He lay there, bloody arms, sometimes aware of us, but he didn’t accuse anyone from his deathbed. He didn’t point a finger, he didn’t say you or you or you did it. He didn’t curse the major from his bed for all of us to hear. He could be doing that. He is aware enough. His eyes open.”
“After he died, then what?” I asked.
Pernia looked uncomfortable. “The major set about digging a grave and getting a coffin. He put his slave to the digging, and me to get nails and all. There was no box, not in a hundred mile, and we got a few nails from a smithy and planks from a farm long ways away and a man there made a box from oak plank nailed up by himself. It be not much, but it’s all we got. We buried the governor there, at Grinder’s Stand the next day, all of us standing there, hats off to the governor, and the major saying the words.”
“Then?”
“Then the major got the trunks and made an account of everything in them, the journals, disputed vouchers, clothing, weapons, and all, and we all set off for Nashville carrying the bad news inside us. The governor’s purse was missing, and someone took it, maybe it got lost on the trail, the governor being so out of his mind, so there was no money for me.
“In Nashville the major gave me fifteen dollars to get here, for I had none, and sent the two trunks with me on the horse. And then he wrote the president—I mean Mr. Jefferson, and I brought the letter with me. He and I got the journals safe to Monticello, just as the governor wanted.”
“And Mr. Jefferson has the letter from Major Neelly?”
Pernia nodded. “He read it while I waited, and then he brought me in and asked me things for a long time, and I answered everything for the president, best I knew how. I give the journals to him, just as my master wanted, and then I went to Washington and talked to the president about it, and came here with the horse and the other trunk, and Mrs. Marks kindly takes me in and bids me to stay.”
There were strange circumstances. Missing money. Major Neelly a checkered man of dubious repute. The odd reappearance of Major Neelly soon after dawn. No one helping Meriwether all night. Two shots and yet a suicide. But as I probed Pernia’s story the rest of the day, and talked with Lucy Marks and her son, my mind kept returning to the overwhelming truth of it all: the disease whose name no one spoke had killed him.
50. CLARK
That December evening, beside the cold hearth at Locust Hill, Lucy Marks, John Marks, and I sat quietly, our hearts in Tennessee.
I would leave for Monticello in the morning.
“Are you satisfied?” I asked them. “I can ask for an investigation.”
“Satisfied, General? Oh, no,” Meriwether’s mother said. “We’ll never be satisfied, not with the reports so sketchy, and the accounts so jumbled, and so many self-serving stories.”
“One word from Thomas Jefferson and the matter will be opened,” I said. “The administration could scarcely refuse him. There’s a good prospect that we can find out exactly what happened.”
John Marks raised a hand. “We’d like to let it rest,” he said. “Just let it be. My mother and I have come to that. It would be best for us, best for Meriwether, best for Mister Jefferson.”
I nodded. I had come to that, too. Meriwether had done what he had to do, caught between terrible scourges, trying to salvage what he could for our sakes.
I had only eulogy to offer them, but eulogy was what each of us craved.
“He was a great man, a great American,” I said, my soul reaching out to these desolated friends. “I remember that great heart, that great mind, that great will, leading us through the unknown with all its perils. I remember his bright curiosity, his wonder at the world and everything in it; the way he marveled at a new bird, or a cloud, or a waterfall, or the way an Indian drew his bow. No man on earth was better fitted to lead, no man alive could have taken us to the ends of the earth and brought us back safely, save for Meriwether.”
They smiled.
I knew that Mrs. Marks, even in her grief, was aglow with pride. “You do him honor,” she said gently.
“The world will always do Meriwether Lewis honor,” I said, “because he earned it.”
“Yes, both of you,” she replied. “You together.”
AUTHOR’S NOTES
The mystery of Meriwether Lewis’s death probably will never be solved. The evidence is too tangled, too contradictory, and too old. For generations there were two opposed theories: he died of suicide induced by depression, or he was murdered.
The suicide theorists argued that he had twice tried to kill himself en route to New Orleans and had made a will, and was depressed by his debts. They cite Jefferson’s observation that melancholia ran in Lewis’s family. The murder theorists argued that a suicide doesn’t shoot himself twice, and there were plenty of people with plenty of reason to kill him, and Lewis showed no sign of manic-depressive disorder or any sort of depression.
A few years ago a Seattle epidemiologist, Reimert Thorolf Ravenholt, M.D., examined the journals and other material and concluded that Lewis had contracted syphilis during his 1805 contact with the Shoshones, and by 1809 the result was paresis, the mental deterioration induced by virulent third-stage syphilis, which led him to his death. Dr. Ravenholt pursued this thesis in three brilliantly argued papers that can be downloaded at his Web site, Ravenholt.com. I recommend in particular “Trail’s End for Meriwether Lewis,” presented to the American Academy of Forensic Sciences in 1997.
This is not the place to debate the issue. Suffice it to say that I found Dr. Ravenholt’s analysis the most persuasive and the only one that adequately explains events and fits much of the evidence. But the other theories are plausible and have serious advocates, and must not be dismissed, though the murder theory seems weakest to me. There is too little known, and too many contradictions, to come to firm conclusions. Of all the mysteries of American history, this one invites the most caution.
We might learn something if Lewis’s remains are exhumed and tested for mercury and evidence of syphilis, a disease that can affect bones. They might also offer clues as to the direction the two shots took, the size of the ball, and so on, and thus throw light on the question of murder.
I chose to construct the novel around Dr. Ravenholt’s superb historical and medical analysis, and also upon a penetrating monograph called The Character of Meriwether Lewis, by Jeffersonian scholar Clay Straus Jenkinson, who brilliantly examines every facet of the complex, troubled, courageous, and sometimes repellent man who died on the Natchez Trace in 1809.
I believe that Meriwether Lewis took his life at Grinder’s Stand, not because he was depressive by nature (I doubt that he was depressive at all), but because he was desperate and hopeless and fearful that his scandalous disease could no longer be concealed from the public. He feared that the national hero would soon be the national disgrace. By killing himself, he might yet preserve honor, not only his own but that of the entire Corps of Discovery.
Had he not killed himself, he might have lived years longer, even though his syphilis, probably complicated by malaria, was steadily destroying him. He knew he woul
d soon become the demented, degenerate husk of the magnificent man he once was, and that was more than a man of his pride and sensibility could endure. Desperate circumstances father desperate acts.
As I examined the question of Lewis’s disease, I found myself discarding the murder theory, and also abandoning the much-publicized idea that Lewis was depressed. Lewis was trapped. He was a courageous young man who was caught in a vise that was steadily squeezing him to death. He could not arrest the course of the disease or halt the decline of his reputation. He turned to one remedy after another, but nothing would heal him. He probably overdosed the mercury and further addled himself. In the space of only three years after his return, his health and spirits were ruined.
And so this novel was born. I came to share Lewis’s horror and despair as I walked beside him. I admired and pitied him. Here was a good man, a greathearted American hero, desperately struggling against an insidious disease that was destroying not only his body but his very person. Here was a Homeric story worth telling. I resolved to tell it as a stark chronicle of decline. Lewis never surrendered. His suicide was a last act of defiance of the disease that was robbing him of his soul.
There are no full-scale biographies of William Clark, but his life can be pieced together from various sources, including Lewis and Clark, Partners in Discovery, by John Bakeless, and William Clark, Jeffersonian Man on the Frontier, by Jerome O. Steffen.
Other useful works include Meriwether Lewis, by Richard Dillon, Undaunted Courage, by Stephen E. Ambrose, and A History of the Lewis and Clark Journals, by Paul Russell Cutright.
There is a vast Lewis and Clark literature, too extensive to be listed here, as well as several excellent editions of the Lewis and Clark Journals, including the majestic and exhaustive new one by Gary Moulton.
A novelist dramatizing history must sometimes depict events for which there is no historical record. The funeral of John Shields, in this story, is such a scene, and there are others. I have also arbitrarily chosen among various spellings and decided which of the many conflicting accounts to use in the novel.
I am indebted to my editor, Dale L. Walker, for awakening in me a fascination with the Lewis question, and offering shrewd and thoroughly researched insights into the various possibilities as well as research material. And I am grateful to archivists at the Missouri Historical Society for pointing me toward various sources about William Clark.
RICHARD S. WHEELER
NOVEMBER 2001
Praise for Snowbound
“A haunting novel about hubris and its consequences.”
—Larry McMurtry, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Lonesome Dove
“A dramatic and colorful epic.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Wheeler … has fashioned a dramatic character study while staying faithful to the outline of events. Frémont had a fascinating career … [and] Wheeler carefully draws the Pathfinder true to history, unafraid to expose his foibles.”
—Historical Novels Review
Praise for Eclipse
“A riveting recreation of the tragic final years of an American legend.”
—Booklist
“A wonderful biographical fiction … vividly described.”
—Midwest Book Review
“[Wheeler] has forever branded Western literature with his presence. [His] characters … are not the people who win every showdown … Instead [they] struggle for their lives, and often their souls.”
—True West
“A riveting novel by [a] master storyteller … Wheeler brings readers a stunningly told and hitherto incomplete story of the tragic, final chapter in the life of Meriwether Lewis, one of American history’s most famous and lasting characters.”
—The Denver Post
BY RICHARD S. WHEELER FROM TOM DOHERTY ASSOCIATES
Aftershocks
Anything Goes
Badlands
The Buffalo Commons
Cashbox
Easy Pickings
Eclipse
The Exile
The Fields of Eden
Fool’s Coach
Goldfield
Masterson
Montana Hitch
An Obituary for Major Reno
The Richest Hill on Earth
Second Lives
Sierra
Snowbound
Sun Mountain: A Comstock Memoir
Where the River Runs
SKYE’S WEST
Sun River
Bannack
The Far Tribes
Yellowstone
Bitterroot
Sundance
Wind River
Santa Fe
Rendezvous
Dark Passage
Going Home
Downriver
The Deliverance
The Fire Arrow
The Canyon of Bones
Virgin River
North Star
The Owl Hunt
The First Dance
SAM FLINT
Flint’s Gift
Flint’s Truth
Flint’s Honor
About the Author
Richard S. Wheeler has written over fifty novels and several short stories. He has won four Spur Awards and the Owen Wister Award for lifetime achievement in the field of western literature. He lives in the literary and film community of Livingston, Montana, and is married to Professor Sue Hart, of Montana State University-Billings. Before turning to fiction he was a newsman and book editor. He has raised horses and been a wrangler at an Arizona dude ranch. Wheeler is the author of The Witness series, the Skye’s West series, and many other novels. You can sign up for author updates here.
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CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Notice
SNOWBOUND
Dedication
PROLOGUE: Senator Thomas Hart Benton
CHAPTER ONE: John Charles Frémont
CHAPTER TWO: John Charles Frémont
CHAPTER THREE: Jessie Benton Frémont
CHAPTER FOUR: Benjamin Kern, MD
CHAPTER FIVE: Captain Andrew Cathcart
CHAPTER SIX: Henry King
CHAPTER SEVEN: John Charles Frémont
CHAPTER EIGHT: Thomas Fitzpatrick
CHAPTER NINE: John Charles Frémont
CHAPTER TEN: John Charles Frémont
CHAPTER ELEVEN: Micajah McGehee
CHAPTER TWELVE: Captain Andrew Cathcart
CHAPTER THIRTEEN: Tom Breckenridge
CHAPTER FOURTEEN: John Charles Frémont
CHAPTER FIFTEEN: William Sherley Williams
CHAPTER SIXTEEN: John Charles Frémont
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN: Benjamin Kern, MD
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN: Captain Andrew Cathcart
CHAPTER NINETEEN: John Charles Frémont
CHAPTER TWENTY: Henry King
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE: Benjamin Kern, MD
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO: Captain Andrew Cathcart
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE: Benjamin Kern, MD
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR: Alexis Godey
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE: Tom Breckenridge
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX: Micajah McGehee
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN: John Charles Frémont
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT: Tom Breckenridge
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE: Benjamin Kern, MD
CHAPTER THIRTY: John Charles Frémont
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE: Alexis Godey
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO: Benjamin Kern, MD
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE: John Charles Frémont
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR: Jessie Benton Frémont
AN AFTERWORD
EC
LIPSE
Dedication
PART I
1. LEWIS
2. CLARK
3. LEWIS
4. CLARK
5. LEWIS
6. CLARK
7. LEWIS
8. CLARK
9. LEWIS
10. LEWIS
11. LEWIS
12. CLARK
13. CLARK
14. LEWIS
15. CLARK
16. LEWIS
PART II
17. LEWIS
18. CLARK
19. LEWIS
20. CLARK
21. LEWIS
22. CLARK
23. LEWIS
24. CLARK
25. LEWIS
26. LEWIS
27. CLARK
28. LEWIS
29. CLARK
30. LEWIS
31. CLARK
32. LEWIS
33. LEWIS
34. CLARK
35. LEWIS
PART III
36. LEWIS
37. LEWIS
38. LEWIS
39. CLARK
40. LEWIS
41. CLARK
42. LEWIS
43. CLARK
44. LEWIS
45. LEWIS
46. LEWIS
47. LEWIS
48. LEWIS
49. CLARK
50. CLARK
AUTHOR’S NOTES
Praise
Also by Richard S. Wheeler
About the Author
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in these novels are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
SNOWBOUND AND ECLIPSE
Snowbound copyright © 2010 by Richard S. Wheeler
Eclipse copyright © 2002 by Richard S. Wheeler
All rights reserved.
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