Jefferson’s Spy:
The Secret Life of Meriwether Lewis
In Jefferson’s Spy: The Secret Life of Meriwether Lewis, Tony L. Turnbow explores Lewis’s relationship with his mentor, Thomas Jefferson, and the secret work he performed on Jefferson’s behalf until his mysterious death on the Natchez Trace in Tennessee.
Meriwether Lewis, co-leader of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, was one of the few men Jefferson chose to perform spy work or “secret services” as it was called at the time. Jefferson propelled Lewis’s rise from a Charlottesville, Virginia farm, to a residence in the East Room of the White House, and then to a 3,500-mile intelligence-gathering expedition into the unknown across the Rockies to the Pacific. Lewis and his co-captain, William Clark, returned to become two of the first American popular heroes.
But Jefferson’s next mission for Lewis would prove a challenge he would not overcome. The work to take Spanish-controlled Texas and Santa Fe entangled Lewis in shadowy networks of spies, assassins, and assorted villains along the enemy border. Lewis died carrying sensitive information to Washington on a road so dangerous it was known as “The Devil’s Backbone.” Though it was claimed that Lewis shot himself two or three times, cut his own throat, and slit his wrists to the bone, Jefferson was informed—and apparently accepted—that Lewis killed himself. Three decades later, a state commission concluded that it was more likely Lewis died at the hands of an assassin.
On America’s 250, this first volume of a two-volume series will offer new information to reexamine one of the nation’s most enduring and intriguing mysteries and provide a new perspective on two of its heroes.
Note* The older typeset books often provided an “errata sheet” when later volumes were printed to correct any errors noted after publication. One error in the current printing that will be corrected when the book is updated is in the third paragraph on page 141. It identifies Fort Pickering on the west bank of the Mississippi River in Tennessee, and it will be corrected to identify Fort Pickering on the east bank of the river in Tennessee. Fort Pickering was on the east bank of the Mississippi River.