A Zombie's History of the United States (10 page)

Now, within seconds, Lewis was applying Dr. Rush’s powder. The wound was relatively light, though “messier than would be desired.” Lewis was able to close it up without losing a significant amount of blood. He then swallowed several drops of the elixir he had made from the Mandan roots. Lewis cleaned up in the river and redressed. He removed several pounds of meat from his buffalo kill and packed it back to camp. He apologized to Clark, vowing to be a new man. “He asured me he was throo with the creetures,” Clark wrote.

By the time the Corps were ready to continue their progress on the river in July, Lewis’s wound was healing nicely and most importantly, he was still alive.

Joys beyond words! I have done it; I am cured! In more ways than dreamt this journey will impact History.

Lewis was right and wrong. His discovery would impact history, but he was not cured. He was something else now.

Lewis the Monster

William Clark December 3rd 1805. By land from the
U.States in 1804 & 1805

—Carved into a tree along the Columbia River

Meriwether Lewis I Am a Monster.

—Carved into a tree along the Columbia River

On December 25, Christmas Day, Fort Clatsop was completed on the Oregon side of the Columbia River, near what is today Astoria, Oregon. Much had occurred on the expedition. They had crossed the Rockies, treated with Sacajawea’s brother’s tribe, and finally, they had reached the Pacific Ocean—though unfortunately not by way of the Missouri. They had failed to discover a direct route to the ocean, yet spirits were high, for they had after all achieved their objective of reaching the Pacific. “Ocean in view! O! The Joy!” Clark had recorded in his journal when the sea was first sighted. Lewis does not mention the discovery. What little writing he did in his journal at this point was documenting his grave physical collapse.

Shortly after his thirty-first birthday in August, a year from Sergeant Floyd’s death, Lewis came to the devastating realization that his cure, in fact, may not have worked. At first his bite-wound had been healing with blessed speed, but eventually it plateaued, never fully healing. Lewis found that if he did not continue to ingest the root elixir, he became ill, cold, and his muscles began to tense. Lewis realized he had not cured himself so much as kept the curse at bay.

Lewis’s complexion was changing, his eyes sinking. Clark chalked it up to common sickness, as one or more members of the expedition had been sick with one ailment or another for most of the journey. Beyond this Clark makes no comment on Lewis’s situation during this period, which would seem to imply that Lewis was composing himself accordingly. None of the Corps seemed to suspect anything. None except Seaman, Lewis’s Newfoundland. As Lewis notes, “The dog has lost all love for me; it growels or barks when I near. Several times he has bit at me when I move to scratch his head.”

The dog was not the only one who could sense something wrong with Lewis. Fort Clatsop, which was to serve as the expedition’s final winter camp, had been named after the Clatsop Indians. The crew had hoped for another harmonious winter with this tribe, as they had the previous winter with the Mandans, but the Clatsops did not want a relationship with the Corps. Though the tribe never expressly said so, Lewis could tell from the nervous way they were eyeing him that he was the reason. Somehow they knew something was not right with him.

On February 7, 1806, something happened that surprised even Lewis. His heart stopped beating—for a full ten minutes. Lewis felt no pain. At first he thought he was failing to locate his pulse correctly. Eventually, and just as inexplicably, his heart began to beat once more. One can only guess at how alarming it must have been. Lewis records:

Nither dead nor living; I am but become something new; something else. God have mercy; what have I done?

Lewis had been known to suffer bouts of depression in the past, so Clark presumed Lewis’s reclusion was simply “Winters blues.” Lewis was fast using up his store of Mandan root. He had accepted that he was not going to get better, but he rightly feared what would happen if the root ran out. Lewis was losing an appetite for regular food. He found himself lusting hungrily to bite into members of the Corps. His heart was beating slower and the periods in which it did not beat at all were growing longer. Fearing he may attack one of his own men, Lewis decided to end it all.

On March 21, 1806, he threw himself off a short bluff onto a sharpened wooden spear he had carefully positioned below. “Destroy this journal, William. Never tell them what I became,” was the only entry he made regarding his suicide, and he presumably left his journal somewhere for Clark to find. Clark never had a reason to search Lewis’s belongings though, for Lewis’s suicide did not succeed. That was the day that Lewis discovered he was already dead.

Landed directly as I planned with the speer; drove into my guts out my back and I hit the ground hard; yet I felt nothing and continued to Be. My bleeding was limited.

Upon removing himself from the spear, Lewis found that he was being watched by an adolescent Clatsop boy. The boy was petrified with terror. When Lewis moved toward the boy, the young Indian ran. Lewis gave chase. He caught the boy, thinking that he would try and explain so the boy would not tell others. Then “some foul instink took over.” Lewis savaged the boy, ripping into him with his teeth and feasting on what he tore off. “O! Lord! No meal has ever tasted so sweet!”

Lewis does not say what became of the boy’s body, but he clearly did not want to stay around for the Clatsops to start to miss him. Upon Lewis’s orders, the Corps made a sudden exit from Fort Clatsop. That winter had been a particularly miserable one, so no one seemed to have a problem with their early departure, even though they ended up needing to make another camp in May because the snow in the Rockies had not yet melted enough to cross.

Since “going beast” and eating the Clatsop boy, Lewis was now fighting an inner battle. Clark noted that Lewis’s “blue fits are geting wors.” Lewis was spending as much time away from the camp as possible. He was trying to eat as much meat as possible, generally eating it raw, but animal meat was starting to disagree with him. By now his heart had completely stopped beating—never to return—and he had no need for the Mandan root. After very nearly attacking Clark’s slave, York, while York lay sleeping against a tree, Lewis knew he could not fight back the hunger any longer. “I have come to this; I will make hunt of Man.”

He had no intention of eating a member of his loyal Corps. He would take one of the Nez Perce Indians the crew had been trading with, like he would a buffalo, bear, or elk. In what is surely the first instance of an undead using a gun, Lewis shot and killed a Nez Perce woman who was washing herself in a stream. “I eate my fill then left the remains.” Lewis by now had realized no one would ever suspect him. He did not seem undead. On some level Lewis had now accepted that he was a monster. There was no looking back.

Aftermath

We must tell no soul of these truthes. Not ever.

—Thomas Jefferson, letter to William Clark, November 1809

On September 23, 1806, the Corps arrived back in St. Louis. The expedition had lasted two years, four months, and ten days, and they had suffered only one death. Technically two, but few were ever to learn of Capt. Lewis’s unusual fate. In fact, even President Jefferson remained ignorant until after Lewis’s death. Jefferson had made arrangements for Lewis’s and Clark’s journals to be published. While both men consented, neither man ever hired an editor or provided any pages to the publisher, which Jefferson found most perplexing.

In honor of their achievement, Jefferson appointed Lewis governor of the Louisiana Territory, and Clark brigadier general of the militia in the Louisiana Territory. Both men made their headquarters in St. Louis. Clark tried to maintain the friendship with Lewis, but it was hard going. Lewis would be reclusive for weeks, then suddenly emerge full of cheer, then recede again for several more weeks. Dr. Benjamin Rush sent an excited letter to Lewis, seeking information about any tests Lewis had done with Rush’s Miracle. Lewis responded with a curt letter stating only, “It did not succeed.”

Lewis’s personal diary tells of the grotesque existence he was living. He avoided people as often as he was able, always fighting the impossible urge to feed. These brief jaunts into sociability that Clark would see were always following Lewis’s “collapses,” as Lewis called them. The collapses were when Lewis could no long control his hunger. He would seek out someone he deemed “naught to miss,” and then kill and feast. As his hunger began to increase, Lewis started luring unfortunate souls to his home where he had designed a series of dungeons in the cellar. Here Lewis could keep the victims alive for weeks, carving off pieces of their flesh with butcher’s tools (so as not to zombinate them), until they finally died.

This continued for nearly two years until rumors began to spread around St. Louis regarding the increasing number of missing individuals. Clark couldn’t help but be suspicious of his old friend. On September 3, 1809, Lewis left on a trip for Washington, D.C., regarding some gubernatorial issues. On September 6, Clark broke into Lewis’s home. Not only did he find and read Lewis’s journals, he also found the dungeons containing the remains of countless victims. “I new then what I must do,” Clark recorded.

Clark did not inform the authorities. He did not even tell his Freemason brothers (both he and Lewis were members). Clark, it would seem, still considered Lewis too good a friend to reveal his heinous secret. Instead, Clark set off as fast as he could, determined to overtake Lewis before he reached Washington. On October 10, Lewis had stopped at Grinder’s Stand, an inn 70 miles south of Nashville. In the early hours of October 11, Clark finally caught up with his old colleague. As Clark records:

As he opened his door he at first smiled. Then he realised what motifs must have carried me such a distance and his smile disapered. I told him what I new and he did not defend. He did not weep nor ask of forgivness. He sed he was relifed that it was over. I sed I must shot him and he new. All he asked was time to writ a letter to the Presdent and that I delivar the letter. I agred.

Lewis dashed off a letter to Jefferson, written in a code the two had developed (Jefferson was a lover of codes) in case Lewis ever needed to send back important information during the expedition. Jefferson destroyed this letter, so we have no way of knowing precisely what it said, but it was mostly likely a confession and apology.

Upon finishing the letter Lewis handed it to Clark. Clark then “fownd myself unable to carry off the deed.” He could not pull the trigger against his old friend. Likely sensing this, Lewis then attacked Clark, forcing Clark to act. Clark put several shots into Lewis before finally hitting him in the brain. By the time servants were drawn in by the gunshots, Clark had slunk away.

President Jefferson, floored by the news Clark gave him, immediately fabricated Lewis’s suicide myth. As Lewis had been known for depressive swings, Jefferson simply built upon this knowledge. Lewis’s family never bought this explanation, suspecting foul play, yet never suspecting the truth. Lewis’s and Clark’s journals were turned over to Jefferson for editing, and Jefferson advised Clark to resist the urge to continue writing of these secrets even in his private diaries. Clark obliged.

Jefferson may have lost a protégé, but he gained something else. He now had Lewis’s zombie “cure.” Though it did not work exactly, it most definitely did
something
. Jefferson knew that either the cure could be perfected, or maybe it could be more appropriately applied in another capacity.

FOUR

Dismember the Alamo THE TRUTH BEHIND ONE OF AMERICA’S GREATEST LEGENDS

Remember the Alamo!

—Rallying cry of the Texas Revolution