01Biography
Meriwether Lewis was an army captain and President Thomas Jefferson's secretary when Jefferson chose him to lead an expedition to the Pacific. Lewis asked his friend William Clark to share the command. From 1804 to 1806 their Corps of Discovery traveled up the Missouri River, crossed the Rocky Mountains and went down the Snake and Columbia rivers to the ocean and back.
Lewis never traveled the Oregon Trail, which opened decades later. He knew the country at its far end. The Corps passed the rapids at The Dalles in 1805 and again in 1806, and spent a winter near the mouth of the Columbia. The official account of the journey, published in 1814, gave Americans their first detailed picture of the Oregon Country, and the Snake River was long called Lewis's River after him.
02Why they matter
Co-led the expedition whose journals and maps first showed Americans the Oregon Country, the land at the far end of the trail.
03How they died
Back home, Jefferson made him governor of Louisiana Territory, but his work there drew criticism and the government questioned how he had spent public money. On his way to Washington, D.C., to answer the charges, he died at Grinder's Stand, an inn on the Natchez Trace in Tennessee, on October 11, 1809, aged 35. Most historians believe he took his own life, though some have argued that he was murdered.
04Legacy
His grave beside the Natchez Trace in Lewis County, Tennessee, has been marked by a monument since 1848 and is a stop on the Natchez Trace Parkway. Lewiston, Idaho, on the Snake River, is named for him.