What happened to Meriwether Lewis after the expedition?
Lewis disintegrated. He fell apart. He just went apart at the seams. You know it happened to some astronauts that we know of, too, coming back and readjusting. And that may be making too much of it but he became the governor of the Louisiana territory. He’s very ill-suited for that. He started drinking. His health was bad. He took opium and became probably addicted to it. He ran up huge debts. He couldn’t find a wife. His friend Clark was living in the same town with a wife, raising a family, and he had been unable to court a woman and get married. He literally did not write a single word on the journals that his mentor, Thomas Jefferson, was impatiently waiting for was the report of their journey. And he never got around to even writing word one of compiling what his journals had. He just literally disintegrated in his post years. He had his friend Clark nearby and he wrote out his will before he decided to go back to Washington D.C. to try to straighten up some discrepancies in the b
