Meriwether Lewis, Suicide or Murder

By Chester Campbell

One facet of my new mystery, The Surest Poison, is hot in the news these days. The opening paragraph of Chapter 2 tells about PI Sid Chance’s former job as police chief in the small town of Lewisville, TN, “named after explorer Meriwether Lewis of Lewis and Clark fame. Lewis died nearby on the Natchez Trace. Some say he was murdered there.”

The town of Lewisville is fictional, but it sits about where the real Lewis County seat of Hohenwald is located. The front page of last Thursday’s newspaper carried a story about Lewis’ modern-day relatives pushing the federal government to exhume the famed explorer’s body and answer the question did he commit suicide or was he murdered? He is buried in a tiny cemetery at the Meriwether Lewis National Monument along the Natchez Trace Parkway.

A bachelor, Lewis died at the tender age of 35. He had no siblings, but there is no shortage of nieces and nephews with lots of great-great-greats before their names. They have banded together to petition the National Park Service to find out how he died. You can check out their new website at Solve the Mystery.Org.

Educated at what would become Washington & Lee University, Lewis joined the Army and rose to the rank of captain. He was appointed an aide to President Thomas Jefferson in 1801 and resided in the presidential mansion. After the Louisiana Purchase, Jefferson planned an expedition to explore a route across the continent to the Pacific Ocean. He chose Lewis to lead the venture. Between 1803 and 1806, Lewis’ pioneering party explored thousands of miles along the Missouri and Columbia rivers and their tributaries.

When they returned in 1806, the Lewis and Clark Expedition had made the two men national heroes. Jefferson was particularly fond of Lewis and named him governor of the Upper Louisiana Territory. It appears the bureaucracy and politics in St. Louis proved a bit too much for him. In the fall of 1809 Lewis set off for Washington and a meeting with the president. He planned to travel down the Mississippi to New Orleans, then around Florida and up the East Coast. After becoming ill around Memphis, he decided to take the land route across to the Natchez Trace and on up to Nashville.

Sick and beset with problems, he drafted a last will and testament during the trip. On the night of Oct. 10, 1809, Lewis and two servants stopped at Grinder’s Stand, a two-room log inn on the Trace near my fictional town of Lewisville. Two shots were heard during the night, and the next morning Lewis was found mortally wounded. He died within a few hours. A traveling companion buried his body near the stable. Covered with chestnut fence rails, it remained unmarked until 1848.

The mystery began immediately, though Jefferson and fellow-explorer William Clark accepted the suicide story. His family contended it was murder. Robberies and killings were not uncommon along the isolated route, and rumors said Lewis was murdered to keep secrets of political corruption. Now nearly 200 distant nieces, nephews and cousins have signed a petition asking that the body be exhumed and examined for forensic evidence.

“What we want is the truth,” 73-year-old Howell Lewis Bowen, a great-great-great nephew, said. “We’ve had one roadblock after another. It’s very frustrating–every time we take a step forward, we have to take two steps back.”

Some historians have criticized the effort, but several archeologists have signed on to help. They include a professor of law and forensic sciences at George Washington University and anthropologists at Middle Tennessee State University. One archeologist says there’s a chance the real cause of Lewis’ death may be etched on his bones, but the chances are pretty low there will be evidence to prove one way or the other.

Interestingly, the explorer’s death was responsible for the creation of Lewis County. In 1843, the Tennessee General Assembly carved it out of neighboring counties and named it as a memorial to Meriwether Lewis.

According to a local official of the Lewis and Clark Trail Heritage Foundation, the young explorer had written friends about things he wanted to accomplish after the Washington trip. She believes he was murdered. The Heritage Foundation plans to mark the 200th anniversary of his death on Oct. 7 by dedicating a bronze bust of Lewis for a planned visitor center.

According to Wikipedia, “Lewis observed, collected, and described hundreds of plants and animal species previously unknown to science. The expedition was the first point of Euro-American contact for several Native American tribes; through translators and sign language, Lewis conducted rudimentary ethnographic studies of the peoples he encountered, even as he laid the groundwork for a trade economy to ensure American hegemony over its vast new interior territory.”

It makes an interesting footnote to The Surest Poison.

Internet - prime source for research

By Chester Campbell

The Internet is a great source for research on a mystery novel. When I started working on The Surest Poison, my new book due out next month, I had the basic idea for a plot contributed by a friend who’s a PI in Nashville. She’d worked a case a few years back that involved the dumping of a large amount of the toxic chemical trichloroethylene, commonly known as TCE.

My first step was to Google the chemical compound to see what it was like, how it was used, and what effects it would have on public health. I found both government and non-profit organization sites devoted to information on various pollutants, including TCE. I copied pages of details on the chemical and its health effects. I also found it was used as a degreaser in cleaning things like auto parts. All vital information for use in the novel.

I decided to locate my fictional chemical dump behind a small plant in a mostly rural county on the west side of Nashville. The other adjoining counties all had large populations and at least one moderate-sized city.

Back I went to the Internet to gather all the information available on Cheatham County. I found enough to steer me in the right direction when I made my first on-scene visit.

Since I put my protagonist, Sid Chance, in my home area of Madison, a northeastern suburb, I didn’t need the Internet or anything else to handle that area. However, I gave him a female sidekick who had inherited controlling interest in a lucrative chain of truck stops from her father, a French Canadian import.

I wanted Jasmine (Jaz) LeMieux to live in a French Colonial mansion in an affluent section on the other side of Nashville. I did a search on French Colonial houses and came up with one I used as a model. I also did a Mapquest search, both street and aerial views, to check out the Franklin Road area for a likely spot.

I also used Mapquest to look into several other areas, including the small town of Centerville, where I had them make a helicopter landing. It was also useful to figure how long it would take to drive from Jaz’s house to the location of a climactic event. And when I did the helicopter flight, I looked on the Bell Helicopter website to pick out the Jetranger III for the ride.

I set a few scenes in the fictional town of Lewisville, where Sid worked as chief of police until false accusations of bribery ended his career. I named it after explorer Meriwether Lewis, who died on the Natchez Trace near where I placed the town. I checked the Internet to be sure I had my facts correct on the Lewis and Clark Expedition’s chief.

I used the Internet in countless other ways to check out minor points. The common advice is to be careful of the facts you get off the web, as there is plenty of misinformation out there. If it was something I needed to be sure of, I always chose a reliable source, and on occasion checked another to confirm what I found.

Another use I made of the Internet was to ask questions on listserves or through emails to people like Dr. Doug Lyle, the forensic guru, or in one case, ex-policewoman Robin Burcell.

The Internet has made researching for a book as easy as sitting down at your computer. It can save hours of time and miles of travel. I recommend it highly.

How To Write a Novel

By Chester Campbell

First you sit down with a pencil and a piece of paper. A pencil? In this day of PCs and laptops and Alphasmarts? A pencil can’t get you on Twitter or Facebook or Blogger.com. Maybe not, but it can jot down all those notes you gather to get started.

John Steinbeck used as many as sixty cedar pencils a day in his writing, and Ernest Hemingway was a major pencil user. I don’t advocate writing your mystery in pencil, but the marvelous little device is a must during the creative process. Look at this neat display of penciled notes on my desk. Okay, neatness isn’t my specialty.



There’s a website called Pencils.com that has all kinds of info on the wooden widget. It notes that the pencil is the only portable, lightweight invention that can draw a line 35 miles long, average 45,000 words and correct its own mistakes.

If you thought it was a latter-day invention, you’re way off the mark. Scribes in ancient Rome wrote on papyrus with metal styluses that left their mark on the forerunner of paper. Some early styluses were made of lead. This led (a little humor there) to calling the legible part of the pencil "lead," although it’s made of graphite.

The first lead stick pencils were wrapped in string. Sort of like those peel-off China markers that will write on most anything. During later times, the lead (or graphite) was inserted in a hollow wooden stick.

Pencils first came into popular use when mass produced in Germany in 1662. The first U.S. pencils were fashioned by a cabinet maker in Concord, Massachusetts after they became unavailable from England because of the War of 1812. Incidentally, Leonardo da Vinci did a lot of pencil sketching. Don’t know how much penciling Dan Brown did while writing Leonardo’s Code.

Meriwether Lewis, the famed explorer of the Lewis & Clark Expedition, carried “1 Set of Small Slates & pencils” on his historic adventure. Which brings us back to mystery writing. My character Sid Chance in The Surest Poison (due out in April) was the former police chief of Lewisville, Tennessee, a fictional small town near the Natchez Trace where Meriwether Lewis died in 1809.

One other note regarding the noted explorer, a small town not far off the Trace named for him, Lewisburg, is home to one of several pencil manufacturers in southern Middle Tennessee. Nearby Shelbyville, better known now for its Walking Horse Celebration, was once called Pencil City. Tennessee became noted for pencil making because of its abundant supply of eastern red cedar, the best wood for writing instruments.

The Shelbyville Pencil Company, which started in 1933, gives their pencils four-to-seven coats of paint and can turn out 400,000 a day. But no doubt the yellow variety called No. 2 is the No. 1 choice of writers.

Now you know how to write a novel. The next question is what do you put in it? Words, of course. And where do you get them? Can you spell t-h-e-s-a-u-r-u-s?

Pre-order The Surest Poison online at Barnes & Noble.