No autopsy until 40 years later...............the historical committee of TN would not even give his body to his family.....................even until today..............

Later analyses[edit]

The only doctor to examine Lewis's body did not do so until 40 years later, in 1848.^[25] The Tennessee State Commission, including Dr. Samuel B. Moore, charged with locating Lewis's grave and erecting a monument over it, opened Lewis's grave. The commission wrote in its official report that though the impression had long prevailed that Lewis died by his own hand, "it seems to be more probable that he died by the hands of an assassin."^[27]

In the book The History of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, first printed in 1893, the editor Elliott Coues expressed doubt about Thomas Jefferson's conclusion that Lewis committed suicide, despite including the former President's Memoir of Meriwether Lewis in his book.^[28]

From 1993–2010, about 200 of Lewis's kin (through his sister Jane, as he had no children) sought to have the body exhumed for forensic analysis, to try to determine whether the death was a suicide. A Tennessee coroner's jury in 1996 recommended exhumation. However, since Lewis's gravesite is in a national park, the National Park Service must approve. The agency refused the request in 1998, citing possible disturbance to the bodies of more than 100 pioneers buried nearby. In 2008, the Department of the Interior approved the exhumation, but rescinded that decision in 2010 after the change in administrations, stating that decision is final.^{[citation needed]} It is nonetheless improving the grave site and visitor facility.^[29]

Historian Paul Russell Cutright wrote a detailed refutation of the murder/robbery theory, concluding that it "lacks legs to stand on".^[30] He stressed Lewis's debts, heavy drinking, and possible morphine/opium use, failure to prepare the expedition's journals for publication, repeated failure to find a wife, and the deterioration of his friendship with Thomas Jefferson.^[8][30]