How did Meriwether Lewis die?

Answer 1

He actually stopped on the way to Washington D.C. in 1809 at a motel in Tennessee called Grinder's Stand. And apparently he acted strangely at dinner, and talked to himself in the way you would talk to a lawyer. And, so the story goes, he asked for some gunpowder and the owner's wife gave it to him, intimidated by his behavior. Later that night she heard two gunshots and through the slit in her door apparently saw Lewis crawling back to his room (though she never could explain why). The next morning she found him near death.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Meriwether Lewis was serving as governor of Missouri Territory in 1809 (just 3 years after the expedition ended). Lewis, a troubled individual, was not suited for the bureaucratic life and found himself deep amongst petty and jealous administrators. On the way to Washington to clear his name, he stopped at Fort Pickering at the Chickasaw Bluffs. Those there described him as mentally distressed.

Three weeks later, he was found in his rooms with two gunshot wounds at a roadside inn at Grinder's Stand, Hohenwald, Tennessee, just south of Nashville. He died the next morning on October 11, 1809. At the time, the shooting was called a suicide, but most people now believe he was murdered (randomly, not as a premeditated target). Jefferson -- for as long as he'd known the man -- admitted that he had suffered from "hypochondriac afflictions."

Answer 2

By a gunshout wound either murder or suicide.