Mystery and Intrigue in Early America

by Michael Brown

Texas State Library and Archives Communicator, July 2006

Guess who wrote a book? TSLAC's very own Frances Hunter! The next time you see Frances, please congratulate her on this remarkable accomplishment!

What's that? You say you don't know who Frances Hunter is? Well, I guess that's not so unusual considering that there is no Angelina profile for her. In fact, you probably won't find her in the ERS database either. One would almost suspect that she's just a figment of my imagination. However, I'm willing to bet you know her.

Frances Hunter is the pseudonym of sisters Liz and Mary Clare. Liz is the Digital Imaging Specialist in Archives and Information Services. She's been at the Texas State Library for five years, concentrating mostly on our divisions online exhibits. Both Liz and Mary reside in Austin and share a recently sparked interest in their subject matter, Lewis & Clark. The book is called To The Ends of the Earth, The Last Journey of Lewis & Clark, and it begins where most history lessons leave off: at the end of the famous expedition. This was a troubling time for Meriwether Lewis. In fact, it was a troubling time for America. Conspiracies and treasons were everywhere. No one, it seemed, was beyond a little treachery. But Meriwether Lewis was especially hard hit by accusations from an increasingly paranoid federal government. He was on his way to Washington to answer to these accusations when he died. It is his death that is the central focus of this book.

Recently I had the opportunity to talk to Liz. Here's what she had to say:

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MB: So wow, you wrote a book! Tell me about your writing background.

LC: My background is actually technical writing; I wrote instructional software manuals. For years I've been a history buff but I never made a living writing about historical matters until I came to the Texas State Library and started working on the web exhibits.

MB: We have quite a collection of online exhibits now. Are you responsible for all of them?

LC: Yes, I'm responsible for pretty much everything to do with them. Researching, writing, designing, finding the documents that go on them.

MB: You haven't always been interested in early America though, have you? Your Angelina profile mentions the FDR era of American History.

LC: Well that was back then when that Angelina profile was written. I hadn't gotten in to Lewis & Clark or early America yet; that came along maybe three or four years ago. I learned a lot about modern American history and then got interest in early American history. Getting interested in Lewis & Clark has led to a deeper interest in early America because it made the period come alive. It wasn't just old guys in wigs anymore.

MB: And what about Mary? What is your sister's background? Was she already a novelist?

LC: She was not a novelist. We had both done a lot of writing on our own on the side. She's a systems analyst at UT.

MB: So both of you have come to this from tech backgrounds. Have you collaborated before?

LC: No, this was the first time we've written together. We both got so interested in this and agreed that it would make a great story.

MB: How long did it take you to write the book?

LC: It's taken about three years from getting interested in it, starting to do the research, and then writing and a million rewrites.

MB: What was it that sparked your interest? Did you and Mary go on the trip and say, I wanna write a book about this?

LC: Well yeah, that's kind of what happened. We talked about taking the trip. And then we did it. When we were up there in Idaho was when we really began to grasp what had happened to Lewis after the expedition. And we agreed that that would make a great book, let's try and do it!

MB: And you did it!

LC: Yes, we did it.

MB: I've got to be honest with you. Of course I know about the Lewis & Clark expedition but I never knew many details of their lives. Your book claims to uncover one of America's greatest mysteries, which is the death of Meriwether Lewis. I don't think I ever got that far in any of my History 101 classes. It's highly intriguing.

LC: Right, most people don't realize that Lewis died just three years after they returned from the expedition. He was only 35. I think part of what's kept Lewis & Clark from achieving the same status as say Daniel Boone is that there's this tragedy involved. And it's the kind of tragedy that many people find, at the very least, uncomfortable. Even shameful that Lewis died that way. It's really confusing, how could he be a hero if he took his own life just three years after the expedition? What interested me about the story was knowing a lot about the expedition and that he was a hero in the traditional sense because he did all these things, yet he was deeply troubled.

MB: He was suffering from severe depression.

LC: And drug addiction, alcohol and laudanum. And he'd gotten himself thousands of dollars into debt, which in the dollars of those days was a lot of money.

MB: What was Lewis' official political role?

LC: He was governor of the Louisiana Territory, which was pretty much all of the Louisiana Purchase except what we now call Louisiana, everything up from Louisiana to the Dakotas.

MB: And this book was written and researched by you and your sister. By the way, how'd you come up with the name Frances Hunter?

LC: It's both our middle names.

MB: Oh okay, and the two of you followed the expedition trail together recently right?

LC: Right, actually we've made three treks because you don't have time to do the whole trek unless you can take a sabbatical. But we made the trek from the Montana portion of the journey all the way to the Pacific. And then we also retraced Lewis' last journey from St. Louis. He was going home over a road called the Natchez Trace, which was also called the Devil's Backbone because it was such a dangerous road. He was going to Washington to explain these accusations against him that he'd been misusing public funds and that kind of thing. And Clark was going to follow him there and support Lewis. Clark remained loyal to Lewis to the end.

MB: Clark read the report in the paper while he was on his way to Washington that his friend had died, right?

LC: Right.

MB: And the report stated that Lewis had been shot in the head and chest, yet it was declared a suicide. That doesn't make a lot of sense.

LC: Yeah, I know, it doesn't jibe. And that's why it's remained a mystery. There's a lot of historical controversy: did he commit suicide or was he murdered? And if so, by whom?

MB: Do you answer this question in your novel?

LC: Yes! That's the central mystery behind this book, we present our theory of what happened. We got really interested in what happened to Lewis and why his life disintegrated. Did he commit suicide or was he murdered? That sounded like a really good book! And we decided, since the death was never fully investigated at the time, who better to investigate it than Clark?

MB: His best friend. He probably knew more about Lewis than anybody.

LC: Yes, Clark was about the only intimate relationship of Lewis' life really. Lewis never got married, he didn't seem to have any success with women. He was really a loner.

MB: But he had worked with Thomas Jefferson, and there are historical suggestions that he had a pretty substantial relationship with him, too.

LC: He was kind of a protégé. It was sort of a father-son relationship, which included the resentments and disappointments that sometimes go along with that kind of relationship. Jefferson had appointed Lewis governor of this territory when they returned from their expedition. But Lewis was no politician; he was a soldier. Jefferson also expected Lewis to be writing a book about what they learned on the expedition, mounting all the scientific discoveries. One of our ideas is that part of what led to Lewis' collapse was that he just couldn't meet all these expectations from Jefferson, the person who he so admired and had done all this for.

MB: So Jefferson was almost trying to mold Lewis into something that Lewis just wasn't cut out for. It's very tragic, and on many levels.

LC: Right. He's a very tragic figure.

MB: Frankly, I don't remember reading about any of this in my college history classes.

LC: It really gets glossed over, and I think that's because it is so tragic.

MB: Do you think that it may also be due to the fact that there was an air of conspiracy and treason involved? Beyond the tragedy of his depression and death, there was the tragedy of these terrible accusations against him.

LC: Something I didn't know until we started researching this book was that there were a lot of treasonous plots that whirled around early America.

MB: So not just with Lewis then, but with others as well?

LC: There was Aaron Burr. There was George Rogers Clark, William Clark’s older brother. There was this James Wilkinson character who plays a major role in the book. Wilkinson was the commanding general of the United States Army and was a double agent for Spain at the same time! So it'd be like the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff being in the pay of a foreign government today.

MB: So conspiracies were widespread at the time.

LC: Very widespread. And there were different plots to take different parts of the country out of the Union and set up kingdoms or private fiefdoms.

MB: Or the New American Empire, which you refer to in your book. Isn't there a conspiracy to place Lewis at the forefront of this grand empire?

LC: Yes, it’s a continuation of what Aaron Burr was doing, and these sorts of plots continued for a number of years before the country really stabilized. That's something you might never learn about in school.

MB: Honestly, I probably would have enjoyed the history a lot more had I been introduced to this degree of intrigue! I mean, sure the journey is fun and all but the underlying mysteries are far more fascinating.

LC: Right, there were political reasons for the Lewis and Clark journey beyond the scientific and brotherhood aspects. To lay claim to this territory before Spain could do so. It was by no means internationally accepted that the Louisiana Purchase was an okay thing to have done or that we could hold on to such a thing.

MB: Do you deal much with the actual expedition in the book? It sounds like this book begins afterward.

LC: It starts after. The journey informs the whole book, naturally, since it was their background. But the expedition is not dramatized in the book. It's the aftermath. Part of it is because there are already a lot of books about the expedition. You can't compete with these different classic accounts!

MB: I was surprised to discover from your research page at your website (see below) that there wasn't a lot of information about Clark. That there wasn't even a full-featured bio of him.

LC: Right, not until just recently.

MB: So what was his background?

LC: Well you know it's funny that there wasn't a full bio of Clark because he was a pretty significant figure in early America. Besides co-leading the expedition, he was from one of the leading families on the frontier. The Clarks were kind of like the Boones. And after the expedition, Clark became the federal official in charge of Indian relations for the whole Louisiana Purchase. He negotiated treaties that ended up getting thousands of acres of land from the Indians. But he's kind of an ambiguous figure because the Indians love him. He was one of the few frontier figures who genuinely liked Indians, liked their culture. On the other hand, he was a federal official. He was responsible for seeing that they moved on, by whatever means necessary.

MB: Whether it was at the expense of the Indians or not.

LC: And in fact when he was an older man he expressed to his nephew that he wondered if he would go to hell for misrepresenting to the Indians what was really happening.

MB: So there's that issue of treachery again.

LC: As we started to divide the Louisiana territory into new territories and states, Clark became governor of the Missouri territory. When the territory became a state and they held a popular election for governor, Clark was overwhelming defeated. The people who lived there thought he was too soft on the Indians. By that time, public opinion had really hardened against the Indians. The expedition and Clark's career was sort of based on the premise that the Indians were here and we were going to have to live with and deal with them for a long time. So let's figure out how to do that. But by the time Clark was older, that perception had shifted and it was like, let's get them out of here, however it has to be done.

MB: So all the work that Clark had been focused on seems to have been unraveled by this sweeping federal paranoia.

LC: Yes, which is just another part of the tragedy.

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Well, I hope you've enjoyed this brief conversation with Liz Clare. If you're interested in reading more, be sure to stop by Frances Hunter's website. There you will find an excerpt from the book, a photo journal of Liz and Mary's journey along the trail and a regularly updated blog. Copies of the book may be purchased from Blind Rabbit Press.

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