ABSTRACT
In a dark forest of troubles, Meriwether Lewis at the age of thirty-five met an ugly death. He died not only in a maze of what were probably temporary difficulties but also in the depths of a real forest, the narrow, shadowed, and dangerous trail that was the Natchez Trace in the year 1809. Along this way, it was almost customary for travelers to be robbed and murdered as they made their daily miles from one lonely stand to another. Lewis met his end at Grinder's Stand in an isolated stretch of the trail between Chickasaw Bluffs and Nashville. To regain a sense of who he was and what he was in the discoveries he shared with his friend William Clark, it helps to experience the West with him in his own words. To read the journals, the spontaneous accounts of the days of the journey, is to make an exploration of the inner territory of a mind.
