Murder or Suicide?

The Grand Lodge AF & AM Museum in Helena displays the masonic apron of Meriwether Lewis. Not only is this treasure important to Freemasonry, it is also important for the role it played in the nation’s most intriguing unsolved mystery: Lewis’s controversial death.

Portrait of Meriwether Lewis by Charles Willson Peale
Independence National Historical Park

According to family lore, Lewis died with the apron in his breast pocket. He was traveling to Philadelphia along the Natchez Trace, on his way to Philadelphia to arrange publication of the Expedition’s journals. This was a dangerous route, called the “Devil’s Backbone,” infamous for criminal activity. Mystery surrounds what happened at Grinder’s Stand, a stopping place along the trail. Lewis died there of gunshot wounds. Mrs. Grinder, the innkeeper, wrote the letter informing President Jefferson that Meriwether Lewis had died by his own hand. The family, however, always suspected foul play.

Stephen Ambrose in Undaunted Courage does not examine the evidence and dismisses the possibility of murder, believing that Lewis was suicidal due to either depression, which he claims is evident at various times throughout Lewis’s life, or due to mental instability, possibly brought on by final stage syphilis. This narrow view ignores the evidence extant.

In 1848, the Tennessee legislature allocated funds to create a memorial at Lewis’s gravesite, but first had to prove Lewis was buried there. The body was partially exhumed and Dr. Samuel Moore examined the remains. He concluded that assassination was the likely cause of death, but it is unknown how he came to this conclusion. According to renowned forensics expert Dr. James Starrs, most historians fail to acknowledge this finding. Further, in 1928 when the Lewis monument was refurbished, the skull was “accidentally” exposed. Delong Rice of the National Park Service reportedly commented, “Isn't it interesting that a man who killed himself had a bullet hole in the back of the head?”

In the 1990s, Dr. Starrs collected 160 signatures of Lewis descendants on a petition to exhume Lewis’s body and settle the question once and for all. The Park Service has refused, perpetuating the mystery.

Lewis & Clark(e) County

At the top of the stone tablet carved into the north entrance of the Lewis and Clark County Courthouse in Helena, you’ll find the name Lewis and Clarke County. It’s the only county in the United States with the name of both explorers. But you’ll also notice that on the tablet, Clarke is spelled with an “e” at the end. That’s because our forebears often spelled their names in various ways. Captain William Clark couldn’t seem to make up his mind, and so sometimes he used the final “e” and sometimes he didn’t. Which spelling was the most correct became a matter of concern. In 1900, Montana Historical Society librarian Laura E. Howey settled the question, researching Clark’s official records.

Laura E. Howey. From Contributions to the Historical Society of Montana
with Its Transactions, Officers, and Members, vol. 6. Helena, 1907

Both as a military officer and as governor of Missouri Clark’s name has no final “e.” Further, publication of Lewis and Clark’s journals at the turn of the twentieth century regularized the spelling of Clark without the final “e.” That meant—oops—the county had the wrong spelling. It took an act of the Montana legislature to allow dropping of that final “e,” but the memory of the older spelling remains on the courthouse tablet.

The Great Falls

The entire two-month journey from the Mandan villages where the Corps of Discovery wintered was easy compared to the portage around the Great Falls of the Missouri. From fifteen miles away Captain Meriwether Lewis, traveling overland with a small advance party on June 13, 1805, saw telltale spray and soon heard “a roaring too tremendious to be mistaken.” Approaching the sound, Lewis saw “spray arise above the plain like a collumn of smoke.”

The Great Falls circa 1901. Stereograph by N. A. Forsyth
Montana Historical Society Photograph Archives, ST 001.292

Humbled by the magnificence of the falls, Lewis felt his written description impossibly inadequate. The grueling eighteen-mile portage around the natural wonder, however, was a month-long ordeal with many days spent in preparation and eleven days in transit. Grizzly bears, rattlesnakes, and “muskquetoes” kept the men vigilant while, scorched by the summer sun, they dragged crude wagons filled with supplies across gullies and around ravines. Today the great rock cliffs over which the water tumbled lie exposed, the falls long since harnessed for hydroelectric power. Although the town of Great Falls has grown up around the area and the portage itself is not discernible, the visitor can still locate the route, identified through documentary and cartographic research. Sites include several campsites, the sulfur spring that saved a critically ill Sacagawea, and Giant Springs. The portage, a National Historic Landmark, is under varied ownership and ranges from highly developed to near pristine.

Neither Empty Nor Unknown

The Montana Historical Society’s current exhibit, Neither Empty Nor Unknown, explains some of the errors Lewis and Clark made. Their primary mistake was thinking that the land was unknown and largely unpopulated, as maps of the time indicated. But in reality, communities lived, worked, and thrived on the land. Places that the expedition named in English already had names known to generations of inhabitants. How could Lewis and Clark have been so wrong? We don’t usually think of the Corps of Discovery’s journey as a seafaring expedition, but that is what it was, modeled on the travels of explorers like the Verendrye brothers and Alexander Mackenzie before them. These voyagers traveled by water searching for the mythical Northwest Passage. Thomas Jefferson charged the Corps with settling this question once and for all. In so doing, the men stayed to the waterways. Lewis and Clark had relatively little contact with Indian people because Montana’s inhabitants infrequently traveled by water. The water served as a barrier, isolating the Corps from the people who lived on the land.

Native American artist John Potter works on a backdrop painting for Neither Empty Nor Unknown.

Lewis and Clark concluded that all Indians were hunters. They were, of course, but they were also family men with wives and children and rich material cultures. They had sharply honed survival skills and a wealth of generational knowledge. Further, each Indian group was uniquely distinct from all the others. There was so much that Lewis and Clark did not see. And what they did not see is what Neither Empty Nor Unknown teaches.

Artifacts like this buffalo robe were researched and created by Native American artisans.

A Native American advisory panel assisted in telling the story from the Indian perspective. There are no tribally specific Montana Indian collections that date as far back as 1805, so Indian artisans searched their oral histories and researched their ancestral traditions to replicate the most authentic items possible. The result is stunning, with many beautiful period pieces, made the way they should be made, by contemporary Native Americans. The visitor moves through the different parts of the one-way exhibit as if on a journey. Neither Empty Nor Unknown is a modern exhibit that offers an entire world of information. Visit Helena, stop by the Society, and see for yourself.

African Americans in Montana

Several instances of the presence of African Americans in the territory before the major gold rushes are known. William Clark’s slave, York, traveled with the Lewis and Clark Expedition in 1805–1806, Henry “Negro Henry” Mills worked for the American Fur Company in Fort Benton from the late 1850s, James Beckwourth was a well-known trapper of the 1820s and 1830s whose life has been the subject of some interest, and Isaiah Dorman served as a Sioux interpreter for the army who fell with Custer at Little Bighorn. Blacks also often worked on the steamboats that traveled widely up and down the Missouri River and docked at Fort Benton.

James Beckwourth. Photo courtesy Nevada Historical Society.

With Emancipation in 1865, African Americans realized new opportunities and joined the westward migrations. While small in numbers, these pioneers contributed significantly to their communities. In 1870, the federal census counted 183 black people in Montana. The number doubled in 1880, reached 1,490 in 1890, and peaked in 1910 at 1,834. Western blacks, many of whom carried the burden of slavery, tended to settle in Montana’s larger urban areas and founded communities within a sometimes hostile and discriminatory larger society. Against the backdrop of the Civil War, blacks often found themselves caught in the bitter struggle between Democrats and Republicans who in theory supported African American equality, but did so in varying degrees. School segregation, black suffrage (achieved in 1867), and anti-miscegenation laws were controversial racial issues in Montana’s early territorial period. Finding consolation and community together, black citizens often established their own churches, benevolent societies, newspapers, and social clubs.

The Montana Federation of Negro Women's Clubs meets in Butte, August 3, 1921.
Montana Historical Society Photograph Archives, PAc 96-25.2

Despite the proportionately small numbers, the 1870 census shows that blacks on the Montana frontier engaged in diverse occupations and mostly concentrated in towns, especially Fort Benton and Helena. More than half of males listed their occupation as laborers, domestics, servants, or cooks, and twenty-seven percent represented themselves as barbers. A smaller percentage proffered their occupation as ranch hands, cowboys, and miners, with one listed as a saloon keeper. A decade later in 1880, blacks still clustered in the larger communities of Helena and Butte where mining activities necessarily attracted service providers and laborers. Fort Benton’s African American population jumped from twenty in 1870 to fifty in 1880 because of the steamboat travel that brought in population from diverse places and because of the employment opportunities steamboats offered.

Canyon Hotel waiters, Yellowstone National Park, 1901. Montana Historical Society Photograph Archives, H-4873.

African Americans who came to Montana in the nineteenth century include William Taylor, a teamster, Samuel Lewis, a highly successful Bozeman barber, John Gordon, a trained chef, and James Crump who worked as a miner. African American women also came to Montana with the first settlers and some assumed non-traditional roles. For example, sisters Parthenia Sneed and Minerva Coggswell ran a Virginia City restaurant, Sarah Bickford eventually owned the Virginia City Water Company, Mary Gordon owned a restaurant in White Sulphur Springs, and Mary Fields drove the stage and held the mail route between Cascade and St. Peter’s Mission.

Mary Fields. Photo courtesy Ursuline Convent Archives, Toledo, Ohio.

In an interview in 1979 for the Helena Independent Record, Norman Howard, grandson of James Crump, reflected on what it was like to be black in Montana. He believed that discrimination was tougher for blacks than for Indians. While Montana never posted signs for “Whites Only” as in the South, the same rules applied and most blacks found menial employment as waiters, janitors, and hotel workers. Blacks were excluded from restaurants, bars, and barber shops. By virtue of such exclusion, tightly knit black communities formed; however, as the civil rights movement brought changes for the better, these communities slowly disappeared. Maintaining a strong black community also proved difficult as the lack of job opportunities in the state drew second and third generation blacks elsewhere.
Although Montana has made small gains in the last decade, 2012 statistics show this ethnic group makes up only 0.6% of the state’s population compared to 13.1% nationally.

Meriwether Lewis and a Forensic Mystery

The Masonic Grand Lodge in Helena owns one of Montana’s most mysterious and intriguing treasures. Meriwether Lewis’s Masonic apron is not only a historically significant artifact, it is also a beautiful piece of artful handiwork. Hand-painted symbols and emblems significant to Masonry embellish the hand-sewn silk apron. In times past, members wore their aprons to reveal Masonic affiliation while traveling in dangerous situations. Meriwether Lewis certainly followed this practice on the expedition, and was the first Mason to travel in Montana. Lewis was traveling along the dangerous Natchez Trace in Tennessee when he died of gunshot wounds under mysterious circumstances in 1809. Whether he committed suicide or was murdered remains in question. Family members believed that the apron was in his breast pocket when he died.

Photo via Discovering Lewis and Clark

The apron passed through several generations until 1924 when the Masons of Missouri purchased it from the widow of a distant Lewis relative. In 1960, Montana’s retiring Grand Master, Joseph Hopper of Billings, bought the apron for five hundred dollars and gave it to the Grand Lodge Museum in Helena. Several dark rust-colored stains mar the front. Samples of the stains tested at the University of Oregon revealed both deer and human blood, but only a sample of Lewis’s DNA could determine if the human blood on the apron belonged to Lewis. How Lewis died is still debated, but during refurbishing of his tomb in 1928, an examination of his skull revealed a bullet hole in the back, unlikely evidence of suicide. A Tennessee coroner’s jury in 1996 agreed evidence warranted exhumation of Lewis’s remains. This would also open the door for further testing of the apron’s human blood for DNA. But the National Park Service, caretaker of Lewis’s grave and monument, has denied the request.

Scarred Trees

Culturally scarred trees in Glacier National Park, the Nez Perce and Bitterroot Forests, the Flathead Lake area, the Bob Marshall Wilderness, and elsewhere in western Montana are indicative of travel corridors that native people used seasonally. Majestic Ponderosa pines and, less often, western larch and other types of trees served as a source of nutrition in the spring when the sap was running. Food was scarce at this time of the year and the people were hungry. Various tribes harvested the sweet bark, or cambium. For the Salish, it was women’s work. They used a stone knife or ax to make a foot-long waist-high incision on the outer trunk of the tree. A pole thrust upward into the bark served as a lever to loosen and peel the outer bark. Then the women used a sharp knife to shave thin strips from the inner layer. Some of the strips were eaten raw on the spot and immensely enjoyed. What remained was dried on drying racks like jerky. When the strips were completely dry, the women pounded the strips into a fine powder and used it as a nutritious sweetener. The procedure did not kill the tree, and often the scars are so old they are nearly healed over. Lewis and Clark noted the practice of peeling bark in their journals, and some scarred trees were harvested as long ago as the 1700s, before Lewis and Clark trekked through Montana. Ponderosa pines are not ready for harvest until the bark turns a reddish color when the tree is about two hundred years old. Forest fires have claimed some of these treasures, but some of the massive survivors have stood for centuries.