The Melancholy Fate of · CAPT. LEWIS ·
The Melancholy Fate of · CAPT. LEWIS ·
A Novel of Lewis & Clark
MICHAEL PRITCHETT
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Unbridled Books
Denver, Colorado
Copyright © 2007 Michael Pritchett
First paperback edition, 2008
Unbridled Books trade paperback ISBN 978-1-932961-59-1
All rights reserved. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:
Pritchett, Michael
The melancholy fate of Capt. Lewis: a novel of Lewis & Clark / Michael Pritchett.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-1-932961-41-6 (alk. paper)
1. High school teachers–Fiction. 2. History teachers–Fiction.
3. Lewis, Meriwether, 1774-1809–Fiction. I. Title.
PS3566.R583M46 2007
813’.54–dc22
2007021533
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Book design by SH · CV
Acknowledgments
It isn’t possible to acknowledge everyone who supported and encouraged the six-year process of writing this book, but first and foremost I want to recognize my family, and my great friend Trish Reeves, and two very amazing, and patient, writers and mentors, Charlie Baxter and Margot Livesey, and my colleagues at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, in particular Bob Stewart, Michelle Boisseau and Whitney Terrell. My thanks also to the University of Missouri System for grant support of this project in the form of a University of Missouri Research Board Grant, which afforded me time off to research and write the book, and to UMKC for grant support through a Faculty Research Grant. Many thanks also go to my editor, Greg Michalson, Fred Ramey, and the other fine folks at Unbridled Books, for discovering The Melancholy Fate of Capt. Lewis and putting their positive energies and resources behind its publication. Also, thank you to New Letters magazine and its wonderful staff for publishing my novel excerpt, “Reason to Believe He Hath Deserted.”
In addition, I’m grateful to all the Lewis & Clark scholars, too numerous to mention, who wrote the books I relied on for my own research, and especially to Gary E. Moulton for his 13-volume edition of The Journals of the Lewis & Clark Expedition, University of Nebraska Press, 1986.
Finally, thank you to all of my friends, and my students, at the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers, at MU, and at UMKC, who have continued to support me through this long, long voyage of discovery between my first book and my second, especially Lee Polevoi, Fred Mayfield, and Donn Irving Blevins (1933–2007).
for Angela and Grace
“If we could have got a person perfectly skilled in botany, natural history, mineralogy, astronomy, with at the same time the necessary firmness of body & mind, habits of living in the woods & familiarity with the Indian character, it would have been better. But I know of no such character who would undertake an enterprise so perilous.”
—Thomas Jefferson, 2 March 1803
“The appearance of the work, which was announced for publication nearly three years ago, has been retarded by a variety of causes, among which the melancholy fate of Captain Lewis is already known and lamented by the nation.”
—Nicholas Biddle, prospectus,
expedition journals, 1814
“It is with extreme pain that I have to inform you of the death of His Excellency Meriwether Lewis, Governor of upper Louisiana who died on the morning of the 11th Instant and I am sorry to say by Suicide.”
—James Neelly, 18 October 1809
1. “…conceipt that he heard me coming on…”
“. . . About half are dead!” Clark said to his visitor, this Washington Irving, who was nearly as old as he himself. What did they want him to say, and why keep coming year after year when he only said the same things again? Everyone wanted to look into the matter, and always went away unsatisfied with his rote answers.
“I saw him once,” this Irving, a famous writer in his own right, said. “At Burr’s trial. I didn’t know who he was at the time.”
Clark waited for a question. Maybe these visitors just needed to talk about Lewis, and of the pain they felt, a flat, empty sense of having missed their own time.
“I wrote a story once, about a man who falls asleep and wakes up in the future,” Irving said, having got distracted, no longer taking notes. “A man who goes to investigate a strange thunder in the mountains and encounters some dwarfish men.”
Clark raised his head and fixed his gaze on this Irving. “How am I to answer?” he asked. “You wish me to say I heard phantom artillery? What if I did?”
They sat in Clark’s study, and he could see out the window to the vegetable garden with one eye, Irving with the other. Clark rather didn’t care if he spoke of it now, or never did again, if this fellow remained forever or got swallowed by the earth.
“Just anything, then, or something about Lewis, or the slave, or the Indian girl,” Irving said.
“Is that all anyone wants to know?” Clark asked, wishing for a lot of crows, or a bombardment, to come level the house. True love vanished, and then one simply wondered. People came asking all the wrong questions and Clark refused to hint at the right ones. “He predicted his death to Aaron Burr’s daughter. Surely you know that much.”
“So many of your party are dead so soon,” Irving said. “In my late tour of Europe, I met a Mrs. Shelley, an author of tragical romance.”
Clark waited, on guard for the question, if there was one. This man’s obscure pain or loneliness made him impatient. Clark blew out through his nostrils.
“Forgive me,” Irving said, “but I no longer know if America is my country or not. The venom of the reviews of my books I cannot describe. I’ve given up stories for history.”
“He was convinced I was coming behind to save him,” Clark said. “I was far away.”
“Is’t true he was murthered?” Irving asked quickly, head down, one dark eye, one brow darting up to nab his quarry.
“No, of course not! He had a cousin who murdered in a temper, then did himself in. The Lewis’s suffer a strain of madness,” Clark said. “So too the whole human race!”
Irving, with his gray-black head, thick and wild hair and charcoaled, crazed brows, had the shipwrecked air of men who strike the limits of their talent too soon. Clark got no pleasure from thwarting him and wished to