April 07, 2022
Volume 52 - No. 14
By Jim Winnerman
At times we all wonder what has happened to a person with whom we have lost contact. The same curiosity occurred to explorer William Clark while thinking about the members of the Corps of Discovery he and Meriwether Lewis led from May 14, 1804 to September 23, 1806.
Reflecting on the 862-day, 8,000mile trek from St. Louis to the west coast and back, sometime between The Paper - 760.747.7119
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1825 and 1828 Clark penned an informal log on the cover of a journal trying to record what had happened to those he had parted company with more than two decades earlier. He could not account for everyone, and even today, after more than 200 years, historians know of only 14 burial sites of Expedition members. In fact, many of the gravesites are memorial markers, since an exact gravesite is unknown. “I have been to each known grave location,”
says Jerry Garrett, an avid amateur historian on all things Lewis and Clark, and past treasurer of the National Lewis and Clark Trail Heritage Foundation. Garrett suggests it is not surprising few of the burial sites are known. “In the years when Expedition members were dying, there was no embalming, so burials occurred close to place of death. Plus, there was a lack of precise documentation in the frontier.”
A Grave Discovery Continued on Page 2
Here is a list of the 14 known gravesites, with input from Garrett. Meriwether Lewis (1774–1809)
While traveling from St. Louis to Washington, D.C. in1809, Lewis stopped at an inn on the Natchez Trace 70 miles southwest of Nashville. He died there the next morning at age 35 from gunshot wounds to his head and abdomen.
Many believe it was suicide from depression, while others contend he was murdered by political enemies