Wednesday, January 7, 2015

Dead,,,,,,,,,at 35...............the age they murdered Jesus Christ ...............................along the Natchez Trace in TN............i walked it, at night, last October.............of 2013..............through snow and driving rain, with the kkk and just about the entire South after me..........

October11

This Day in History

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Also on This Day

LEAD STORY: Jimmy Carter wins Nobel Prize, 2002
AMERICAN REVOLUTION: Benedict Arnold fights valiantly at Valcour Island,1776
AUTOMOTIVE: Blind driver breaks land-speed record, 2008
CIVIL WAR: Rebels raid Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, 1862
COLD WAR: Reagan and Gorbachev meet in Reykjavik, 1986
CRIME: A mail car explodes in a train robbery, 1923
DISASTER: Yellow fever breaks out in Philadelphia, 1793
GENERAL INTEREST: Benedict Arnold and the Battle of Valcour Island,1776; Boer War begins in South Africa, 1899; Pope opens Vatican II,1962; Apollo 7 launched, 1968
HOLLYWOOD: Saturday Night Live debuts, 1975
LITERARY: Elmore Leonard is born,1925
MUSIC: Bruce Springsteen scores his first pop hit with "Born to Run", 1975
OLD WEST: Meriwether Lewis dies along the Natchez Trace, Tennessee, 1809
PRESIDENTIAL: Bill Clinton marries Hillary Rodham, 1975
SPORTS: Martinez-Zimmer scuffle interrupts ALCS, 2003
VIETNAM WAR: Viet Minh take control in the north, 1954; Kennedy ponders the Vietnam situation, 1961
WORLD WAR I: Bulgaria enters World War I , 1915
WORLD WAR II: United States defeats Japanese in the Battle of Cape Esperance, 1942

Old West

Oct 11, 1809:

Meriwether Lewis dies along the Natchez Trace, Tennessee

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On this day in 1809, the famous explorer Meriwether Lewis dies under mysterious circumstances in the early hours of the morning after stopping for the night at Grinder's Tavern along the Natchez Trace in Tennessee.

Three years earlier, Lewis and his co-commander, William Clark, had completed their brilliant exploration of the newly acquired Louisiana Territory and the Pacific Northwest. Justly famous and celebrated throughout the nation as a result, Lewis nonetheless found his return to civilized eastern life difficult. President Thomas Jefferson appointed him as governor of Louisiana Territory, but Lewis soon discovered that the complex politics and power struggles of the territory were earning him more enemies than friends. At the same time, bureaucrats in Washington, D.C., were questioning the legitimacy of some of the purchases Lewis had made for the expedition in 1803, raising the threat of bankruptcy if he were forced to cover these costs personally. Finally, some three years after the end of his journey, Lewis still had failed to complete the work necessary to publish the critically important scientific and geographical information he and Clark had gathered in their journals-much to the disappointment of his close friend and mentor, Thomas Jefferson.

For all these reasons, most recent historians have concluded that Lewis' death was a suicide brought on by deep depression and the heavy weight of worries he bore. According to the account given by Mrs. Grinder, the mistress of the tavern along the Natchez Trace where Lewis died, during his final hours Lewis began to pace in his room and talk aloud to himself "like a lawyer." She then heard a pistol shot and Lewis exclaiming, "O Lord!" After a second pistol shot, Lewis staggered from his room and called for help, reportedly saying, "O Madam! Give me some water, and heal my wounds." Strangely, Mrs. Grinder did nothing to help him; she later said that she was too afraid. The next morning servants went to his room where they reportedly found him "busily engaged in cutting himself from head to foot" with a razor. Fatally wounded in the abdomen, Lewis died shortly after sunrise.

Based largely on Mrs. Grinder's story, most historians have argued that Lewis tried to kill himself with two pistol shots, and when death did not come quickly enough, tried to finish the job with his razor. However, in a 1962 book, Suicide or Murder? The Strange Death of Governor Meriwether Lewis, the author Vardes Fisher raised questions about the reliability of Mrs. Grinder's story and suggested that Lewis might have actually been murdered, either by Mrs. Grinder's husband or bandits. Since then a minority of historians has continued to raise challenges to the suicide thesis. But ultimately, nearly two centuries after the event, we may never be able to discover exactly what happened that night along the Natchez Trace when one of the nation's greatest heroes died at the tragically young age of 35.

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