Around 1847 there began an effort to erect a proper monument over the grave of poor Meriwether Lewis, who had been buried in a grave at the wayside inn called Griner’s Stand where he met his mysterious death on October 11, 1809. After he was buried, there wasn’t even a fence placed around his grave to keep his remains safe. Lewis’s good friend the ornithologist Alexander Wilson visited the gravesite in May of 1810 and paid Robert Griner to put up a rail fence around it. There matters stood until the monument was erected in 1848.

The monument committee reported to the legislature of Tennessee in this 1850 report. They stated they had dug up the remains of Meriwether Lewis and examined his “upper torso,” establishing conclusively that this was the grave of Governor Lewis. 

Later in the report they state:  “The impression has long prevailed that under the influence of disease and body—of hopes based upon long and valuable services—not merely deferred, but wholly disappointed—Governor Lewis perished by his own hands. It seems to be more probable that he died by the hands of an assassin.”

It was always said in Tennessee that Meriwether Lewis was murdered. It was said that a local coroner’s jury met in 1809 and felt that Robert Griner had participated in his murder, but they were afraid to charge him. This report has been lost.

The report of the 1847 grave exhumation has also been lost, but this official report to the state legislature directly implies that they found enough evidence to believe that he “died at the hands of an assassin.”

On his last journey, Lewis traveled from Chickasaw Bluffs (present-day Memphis) in the company of Major James Neelly, a somewhat shadowy figure who was the federal agent to the Chickasaw nation. To get to the agency, Lewis and Neelly would have had to follow no easy pathway, but a rough, briar-choked trail through central Mississippi called Pigeon Roost Road. Neelly’s agency lay along the Natchez Trace about 100 miles south of the Tennessee line, adjacent to the principal Chickasaw village, a place called Chuckalissa or Big Town (present-day Tupelo, Mississippi).

If you visit the Natchez Trace today, you’ll find several stops along the parkway where you can learn about the agency, Big Town, and the Chickasaw lifestyle. Big Town was situated in a large open valley. It consisted of about three hundred log cabins and huts, extensive corn and tobacco fields, and orchards of apples and peaches. These extensive agricultural enterprises were tended by the Chickasaws themselves and their African-American slaves.

As the Chickasaw agent under Thomas Jefferson, Major Neelly would have had many duties. As you might expect, he enforced federal law in the territory with regard to intruders, traders, contraband, and treaty provisions. He watched out for any foreign intrigue from the British and the Spanish, still a strong possibility in those years. Neelly would also have been expected to bring “civilization” to the Chickasaws—not that they needed it—and encourage the Indians to believe that they should sell off their excess land to whites in order to concentrate on their own farms.

Apparently, Neelly wasn’t any too comfortable as the Chickasaw agent. In August 1809, he wrote to Secretary of War William Eustis asking for a loan, saying that he’d found the “old agency house untenable” and needed money for a new one “to put my family in.” Did his financial straits make Neelly vulnerable to the very intrigue he was charged with preventing? What role did he play in the death of Meriwether Lewis, whom he was supposed to be looking after?

These are questions that history has no answers for, but as historical novelists we loved exploring.

To get to the Natchez Trace, Lewis and his traveling companions followed an old Chickasaw trail called the Short-Cut Trail or Pigeon Roost Road. Today’s Highway 78, which runs from Memphis to Tupelo (the site of the main Chickasaw town) to Birmingham roughly follows this old route.

The countryside, however, was completely different from the pleasant rolling farmland you see when traveling Highway 78 today. Pigeon Roost Road was a winding, turning trail that crossed many creeks, lagoons, and rough cypress breaks. Like the Natchez Trace, it was infested with outlaws. The dense stands of old-growth cypress (standing as high as 170 feet and spanning a massive 10-15 feet in diameter) provided cover not only for outlaws, but for vast numbers of birds, especially passenger pigeons. It was said that millions of pigeons roosted there to breed, so many that their weight would break the limbs of these great trees.

Lewis might have imagined that the land would be cleared and deforested, but he certainly never have imagined that the passenger pigeon could ever go extinct. As late as the 1860s, they existed literally in the billions, one of the most numerous animals that has ever existed on earth. When a flock of passenger pigeons took flight, it could take two hours for it to pass overhead.

But like the vast army of buffalo in the west, these birds were hunted relentlessly, especially after the advent of the railroad made it possible to ship them by the boxcar in time to reach the eastern markets before spoiling. Retailing at one cent a bird, the passenger pigeons provided cheap protein for the poor in America’s growing cities.

The details of the bird’s demise are a heart-breaking commentary on the greed and short-sightedness of the human race. For example, an 1878 hunt at one nesting site in Michigan resulted in the killing of 50,000 birds per day for a solid five months until every individual had been tracked down and killed.

The result of the overhunting was a complete and catastrophic collapse of the pigeon population. The bird’s entire biology relied on its high population density. Conservationists trapped as many birds as they could and tried to reestablish the species in captivity, but the task proved impossible. The remaining birds would not reproduce under artificial conditions.

In the meantime, the slaughter of the wild birds continued until 1896, when the final 250,000-member flock of passenger pigeons was deliberately annihilated by sportsmen. The last verified sighting of a wild passenger pigeon came in Ohio in 1900. In 1914, the last passenger pigeon on earth, a bird named Martha, died alone at the Cincinnati Zoo. Her body is preserved at the Smithsonian.

The Passenger Pigeon: Once There Were Billions is a good essay that imagines what it must have been like to experience the arrival of a flock of passenger pigeons and talks about why the passenger pigeon died while its closest relative, the mourning dove, continues to prosper.