WASHINGTON — Did Meriwether Lewis — half the leadership of the Lewis and Clark Expedition that explored the Louisiana Territory — commit suicide or was he murdered along the Natchez Trace in Tennessee almost 200 years ago?
That’s what 198 of his distant relations want answered after a 13-year-long effort to have his remains exhumed from beneath his monument outside Hohenwald, Tenn.
Two of them — retired Air Force Col. Thomas McSwain of West Virginia and Howell Lewis Bowen of Virginia — made their case at The National Press Club this morning.
Both men are fourth great-nephews and descendents of Lewis’ sister, and they said they want school children to have the truth, not guesswork, about whether the famous explorer — deep in debt and possibly suffering symptoms of syphilis — killed himself or was murdered in October 1809 as he returned from St. Louis to Washington along the Indian trail.
“Our family wants to put an end to the mystery hanging over how Uncle Meriwether died,” said Bowen, 73. “We deserve an answer.”
Not all the family members support the idea, and some historians have questioned its value. But Bowen and McSwain are undeterred.
Their initial attempt to get the U.S. National Park Service to waive its policy against exhumations on federal lands was rejected in the late 1990s. That followed a two-day coroner’s inquest in June 1996 that could not reach a finding for Lewis’ cause of death, and recommended exhumation.
Eighteen months ago, Assistant Secretary of the Interior Lyle Laverty appeared to give the project’s supporters reason for optimism when he wrote lawyers seeking the exhumation permit that, after careful consideration, he found it “appropriate and in the public interest.”
Since then, there has been no movement except the promise by the park service to begin an environmental assessment of the proposed plan based on a permit application received in late January. The applicants’ Washington lawyer, Kirsten Nathanson, told the press club audience today that the family is “weary and puzzled” by the park service’s “mixed signals.”
A regional spokesman for the park service in Atlanta, Bill Reynolds, said today, “We have a process that’s legally mandated that we have to go through.” He couldn’t say how long that process might take.
If the project goes forward, the descendents intend to raise funds privately, estimated at about $250,000. Forensic anthropology work on the bones would be conducted by Middle Tennessee State University forensic anthropology professor Hugh Berryman and a team of internationally recognized experts.
Berryman said the remains would be examined at an MTSU lab over about a week and “would be treated with the utmost respect.”
Bowen and McSwain acknowledged that family support is not universal and that historians are divided over what might be learned. The late Stephen Ambrose, author of the best-selling “Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson and the Opening of the American West, “told The Commercial Appeal of Memphis, Tenn. in 1996 that nothing of value could be learned by digging up the explorer.
“My attitude is, let him rest,” Ambrose said then.
But Berryman, the forensic anthropologist, said that if the bones are well preserved, he might be able to determine if the wound to Lewis’ head came from behind, an almost certain indication that he was murdered.
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