The Trouble With Studying History (1 cent)

From Lee Meriwether's "My Yesteryears", writing about the death of his ancestor, Meriwether Lewis. Lewis died in 1809, only a few years after the end of the Lewis and Clark exploration of the northwest. He writes:

"In October, 1809, Lewis died either by his own hand or by that of a murderer. The suicide theory rests upon a letter written by Jefferson, but facts discovered later point plainly to murder. Lewis was on his way with important papers for Jefferson. He planned to go by boat down the Mississippi to New Orleans an thence by sea to Baltimore, but at Memphis were alarming rumors of war with England. Actually war did not come until 1812, but even as early as 1809 impressment of Americans into the British navy made many men believe war was imminent.....Several days out from Memphis, Lewis and a friend named Neeley, and a Negro servant who accompanied him, plunged into the wilderness....The first cabin he found belonged to a man named Grinder. Lewis stopped there for the night, and next morning he was found dead in bed, a bullet hole through his head. Grinder was gone, and with him Lewis' watch, money and papers. Many months later Grinder was caught in North Carolina, brought back to Tennessee and tried for murder; he had Lewis' papers; he, formerly almost a pauper, had bought land and slaves. He could not explain his sudden riches; the circumstantial evidence that he had killed and robbed Lewis was strong. but no one had witnessed the deed, and Mrs. Grinder swore Lewis had killed himself. And so the jury's verdict was "Not Guilty".

"In those days, weeks, even months were required for news from the wilderness to reach Washington. Long before he knew, if he ever knew about Grinder's disapearing with Lewis' money and papers, Jefferson had received Mrs. Grinder's suicide story, and had written the letter which has come down to our own day, stating that Meriwether Lewis died a suicide. Had Jefferson known all the facts, he would not have written that letter."

This book was written in 1942.

From a book written over sixty years later, "Before Lewis and Clark" by Shirley Christian:

"A few days before Pierre started down the Mississippi, Meriwether Lewis had set out from St. Louis to go down the Mississippi and get a ship for Washington, intending to defend himself with regard to his use of government moneys......Shortly before his departure, Lewis spent a day with William Clark.....Clark wrote his brother Jonathan that......his friend was in a great deal of distress, 'ruined' by the government's decision to protest some of his expenditures....by the time Meriwether Lewis had sailed from St. Louis, he was in a deranged state, twice trying to kill himself, according to the boat crew. At Chickawaw Bluffs, the future Memphis, the fort commander, Captain Gilbert Russell, put him under a suicide watch.......But Lewis passed an anguished evening, and in the early morning hours of October 11 he took out his pistols and shot himself, first with one, then the other. When the owner of the house heard the shots, she summoned the two servants, but they arrived too late to save Lewis. Death came shortly after daybreak."

Nothing about Grinder, or a murder trial.

Which, if either, story is correct?