The Secret History of Twin Peaks Read online

  2 An update appears on an adjoining page, and if taken at the president’s word, was written approximately one year after the previous entry—TP

  3 Does “it” refer to the ring described, and drawn, by Lewis in his earlier post?—TP

  4 Two additional entries in the dossier pertaining to Lewis’s time in that office follow—TP

  *5* THE MISSOURI GAZETTE, SEPTEMBER 21, 1808

  This appeared on the bottom of the third page of the paper, as a minor news item. Not long afterward Lewis initiated William Clark into the St. Louis Lodge. Clark later founded Missouri Lodge 12 and remained active in Masonic circles during the remainder of his life. Jefferson may have initiated Lewis into the secretive fraternal order personally.1

  These theories suggest that there were two esoteric organizations vying for future control of the developing nation: one with positive democratic intentions for its citizens (Freemasons) and the other malign (the Bavarian Illuminati), interested only in enriching its elite class at the expense of the general populace. Opposing ideologies, it might well be said, which continue that struggle to this day.

  It should also be noted that Lewis financed and organized the publication of the Gazette, the territory’s first newspaper, soon after his arrival, bringing a civilizing influence to a rough frontier colony that at the time of his arrival numbered no more than 300 people. Which suggests he may well have written the article shown here personally.2

  I have occasionally underlined passages that seem to me pertinent to consistent thematic details.

  1 Theories about the arcane influence of the Masons on the early development of the American government abound. For instance, it’s often suggested that the design for the country’s Great Seal—the pyramid-and-eye-symbol that appears on the one-dollar bill—was passed to Jefferson one dark night by a mysterious hooded figure who just as quickly vanished. Almost a third of our presidents have been Masons. As I’ve discovered, one could fill a library with books written on the subject—TP

  2 What significance the creator of the dossier ascribes to the two men’s participation in Freemasonry is difficult to yet fully ascertain, but may be hinted at by the following entry—TP

  *6* FINDINGS OF AN INQUIRY CONDUCTED INTO THE DEATH OF MERIWETHER LEWIS, 19891

  On the evening of October 10, 1809, arriving alone on horseback, Meriwether Lewis took shelter for the night at an inn along the Natchez Trace, a primitive trail carved through the Tennessee wilderness, seventy miles southwest of Nashville.

  Still the governor of the Upper Louisiana Territory, Lewis had left St. Louis and was en route to Washington, D.C., for two purposes: the first was to personally protest and, he hoped, overturn State Department denials of various reasonable expenses spent out of pocket in the discharge of his office, leaving his financial affairs in a precarious state.2

  Lewis planned to attack this predicament directly: he had finally organized all of his and Clark’s journals from the Expedition of Discovery. He was on his way to deliver them to a Philadelphia publisher and collect delivery money promised by a contract arranged prior to his departing for St. Louis to assume his job as governor.

  His second and more secret purpose--according to recently uncovered sources--was to deliver to Jefferson and his newly elected successor, President James Madison, evidence of a conspiracy of corruption and usurpation being waged by the young country’s political enemies in the Louisiana Territory.3

  This correspondent now believes that while serving in St. Louis, Governor Lewis discovered that General James Wilkinson--who had exposed Burr’s plot to Jefferson--had in fact been a principal in this traitorous cabal and exposed Burr’s treachery only to save himself.

  Wilkinson, the commanding general of the United States Army, had for decades been working as a double agent for the Spanish crown, during which time he ruthlessly destroyed the careers of multiple rivals through the use of forged poison pen letters, slander, secret ciphers and other means. None of this would come to light until Wilkinson’s death in 1825.

  He had also, previously, attempted to murder Meriwether Lewis. Wilkinson had betrayed Jefferson’s confidence by revealing to his Spanish handlers the Corps of Discovery’s secret expedition. While Lewis and Clark were in the field, Spain ordered Wilkinson to stop them by any means necessary. Three different times companies of Spanish assassins, over 200 in number, ventured north after the Corps of Discovery, once missing them near the Platte River by less than two days. If these men had succeeded in finding them, the subsequent history of the United States would have been drastically altered.4

  Lewis left St. Louis carrying extensive evidence he’d uncovered of Wilkinson’s past and present treachery, which he intended to deliver to Jefferson and Madison. Lewis had originally planned to travel downriver to New Orleans and from there by boat to Washington. So concerned was he about his real intent being discovered by Wilkinson--then commanding officer of corrupt New Orleans--that Lewis abandoned his route to Washington mid-journey, left the river at Fort Pickering--near present-day Memphis--and set off on horseback into the wilds.

  Lewis wrote a letter to President Madison from Fort Pickering to explain his change in plan: “my fear of original papers relative to my time in office falling into the hands of our enemies induced me to change my route and proceed by land through the state of Tennessee to Washington.”5

  The man who accompanied Lewis from Fort Pickering, as his guide and protector until Nashville, was Major James Neely. Neely had recently been named agent in charge of relations with the Choctaw Indian Nation in western Tennessee.

  A recent posting that had been made--unbeknownst to Lewis--by none other than General James Wilkinson.

  *LEWIS’S LAST NIGHT

  On the evening of October 10, 1809, Meriwether Lewis arrived alone at the log cabin lodging known as Grinder’s Stand--the home of John Grinder, who was away on business. His wife, Priscilla Grinder, admitted Lewis. His servants, whom Lewis had sent out to recover pack animals that had run off earlier that day, arrived later. Mrs. Grinder noticed Lewis was armed with two pistols, a rifle, a long knife and a hatchet worn in his belt.

  While eating little of the dinner Mrs. Grinder prepared, Lewis appeared agitated. After the meal, according to Grinder, he paced back and forth in front of the cabin, smoking a pipe and talking to himself. Mrs. Grinder described him as “talking like a lawyer” and ranting about his “enemies.”

  She also saw him continually “worrying” a small leather pouch he kept around his neck on a rawhide loop.

  This went on past dark. When Lewis stepped inside, he appeared lucid and spoke kindly to her. But when she prepared a bed for him, Lewis refused to sleep on it, and instead made a pallet against a wall facing the front door with a buffalo robe, his pistols at his side.

  After setting up Lewis’s servants in the barn, Mrs. Grinder went to bed with her children in an adjoining cabin. She was awoken at three o’clock in the morning by the sound of a struggle from next door--heavy objects falling to the floor, cries, then a gunshot, followed by another.

  She heard Lewis shout “Oh Lord!”--but claimed she was too terrified to come to his aid when he then called to her for help and water. She also claimed she saw him through cracks in the cabin wall staggering around outside in the moonlight.

  Mrs. Grinder roused his servants at first light, and they found Lewis still alive, lying in a pool of his own blood. He’d suffered two gunshot wounds, to the back of the head and the abdomen, and his throat and arms had been slashed with a knife or razor. Mrs. Grinder claimed that Lewis begged them to use his rifle to finish him off before falling quiet and dying shortly afterward.

  The Indian agent who’d served as his escort, Major James Neely, arrived at the inn before noon that morning. He identified himself to Grinder as an associate who had been traveling with Lewis since Fort Pickering but had stayed behind the day before--at Lewis’s insistence--to search for two horses that had strayed into the woods. Why he arrived a full 12 h
ours after Lewis’s servants--who’d been charged with the same task--was not asked or answered.

  Making no effort to alert local authorities, Neely surveyed the scene, claimed all of Lewis’s possessions and supervised his burial in a hastily built coffin on the property nearby. A few days later, Neely wrote this to Thomas Jefferson and posted it from Nashville:6

  Jefferson published a public statement in response, which accepted Neely’s tragic version of events without questioning. As a result suicide was quickly then and has ever since been assumed as the cause of Lewis’s death.

  Jefferson’s opinion was based exclusively on Neely’s account of the testimony given him by Mrs. Grinder, the sole witness to the tragedy. And, later, on one other.

  *THE RUSSELL LETTERS

  Jefferson’s opinion of Lewis’s troubled state was reinforced by only one source: a letter unavailable to the public for almost 200 years describing Lewis’s journey from St. Louis to Nashville. The letter was written to Jefferson and signed by the commander at Fort Pickering, Lewis’s friend Major Gilbert Russell, and dated two years after Lewis’s death.

  According to this letter, Lewis had arrived at the fort from St. Louis in a “state of mental derangement” brought on by despair about his economic troubles and compounded by bouts of heavy drinking. Russell states that the ship’s captain told him Lewis had attempted suicide twice between St. Louis and Fort Pickering. Lewis had attempted to take his life yet again since his arrival, so Major Russell had seen fit to incarcerate him until he was “completely in his senses,” at which point the letter concludes with Lewis, having regained his equilibrium, departing for Nashville with Major Neely.

  The tone and style of this letter is completely at odds with an earlier letter written by Russell and received by Jefferson in the weeks after Lewis’s death. This earlier letter makes no mention of suicide attempts or “derangement” and instead paints a warm portrait of Lewis consistent with everything known about him, saying that in the weeks before his death he appeared thoughtful, strong-minded and purposeful. Near the end of this letter, Russell refers to Lewis’s death as a “murder.”

  The first letter Jefferson received has been thoroughly authenticated as being written in Russell’s hand.7

  A grand jury investigation into the death of Governor Lewis conducted recently by the state of Tennessee conclusively determined that the second Russell letter, discovered two centuries afterward, is a forgery.

  Not only was the second letter forged, but this damning document came directly from the office of General James Wilkinson. Handwriting analysts found an exact match to the hand of Wilkinson’s clerk, who wrote all his correspondence. The forged letter was not only sent to Jefferson, a copy was made and placed in Wilkinson’s files, a common practice in the days before automated copying. That’s where it remained until its recent discovery.8

  So why was this second letter sent over two years after Lewis’s death? There’s a cold-blooded logic to it; it was written while Wilkinson was being court-martialed for treason over his own role in the Burr conspiracy, a charge ultimately dismissed for lack of evidence.

  While Wilkinson escaped conviction on this and two other treason charges during his lifetime, it finally came to light after his death in 1825 that he had been serving as a double agent for Spain since 1787.

  So, a reasonable conclusion: After being charged with treason, Wilkinson forged this letter to falsely establish that during his journey Lewis was in a suicidal state of mind, in case Wilkinson should ever be questioned about what role he might have played in his tragic death.9

  *LEWIS’S POSSESSIONS

  Major Neely and the trunks holding Lewis’s possessions reached Nashville a week after his death. The trunks were sent on to Monticello, where they arrived at the end of November. A man named Thomas Freeman–operating under the orders of his longtime superior officer, General James Wilkinson--conveyed them to Jefferson’s estate.

  Only one inventory of Lewis’s possessions survives, one taken by Jefferson’s secretary, Isaac Coles, after they reached Monticello. Coles’s list makes no mention of the $220 with which Lewis was known to have left Fort Pickering. Nor does it include any mention of Lewis’s pistols, hunting knife, two horses or gold watch.

  Major James Neely kept Lewis’s best horse after his death and was seen in public wearing Lewis’s knife and pistols on his belt, as well as his gold pocket watch. (May we presume he also kept the cash? Affirmative.) This somehow made the local papers and was brought to the attention of Lewis’s family. Shortly afterward, Neely was confronted by Lewis’s brother-in-law, who requested the return of these personal items. He secured only the horse before Neely slipped from sight and from history.

  Also missing from the inventory: a substantial percentage of Lewis’s papers, which Coles described as having been “thoroughly rifled through.” This includes the evidence of Wilkinson’s corruption in Louisiana that Lewis referenced in his letter to Madison--along with many of his journals from the Expedition of Discovery. It is firmly established fact that Lewis left Fort Pickering with these writings in his possession.

  Also missing was a sophisticated cipher device, of Jefferson’s own design, that Lewis had used for years to encode messages he sent to Jefferson.10

  Most of the papers that went missing have never been recovered. When the “definitive” edition of Lewis and Clark’s journals was published no mention or explanation was offered about the peculiar absence--covering more than half of their two-year mission--of so many entries written by the man of letters in charge of the mission.11

  Also listed in the inventory: small leather pouch found hung around the governor’s neck--empty.12

  Last among the possessions that were inventoried remains the most curious: Found stuffed in the pocket of his coat, the Masonic apron of the governor, bloodstained.

  * Meriwether Lewis’s bloodied Masonic apron today

  A word of explanation: A version of this ceremonial garment is given, upon entry, to every initiate accepted into the Masonic Order. A symbolic version of a craftsman’s tool belt, or in the parlance of the day an “apron,” this object is worn during all Masonic meetings and rituals and is supposed to remain in the possession of the initiate at all times. Made from silk, backed with linen and hand-painted with the Order’s arcane symbols--including the “all-seeing eye,” which also adorns the one-dollar bill.

  This highly personal object was returned by Jefferson--a fellow Mason--to Lewis’s mother. It was passed down through three generations of descendants before being given to the Masonic Grand Lodge in Helena, Montana, where it remains on display to this day. Its provenance is unshakable.13

  With the permission of the Lodge, this correspondent was able to gain possession of the apron in order to perform a complete examination. Tests conducted on the bloodstains still visible on the garment yielded the following results:

  DNA testing confirms--through detailed comparison with samples from living relatives--that the blood on the apron is not that of Meriwether Lewis. The blood on the garment belongs to two other individuals--unidentified.

  Is it possible that, after murdering him, his assailants wiped their own blood on this garment, sacred to Lewis as a Mason, as an act of desecration? Did this act betray some underlying antipathy to the organization that hints at their identity or motive?

  *OFFICIAL INQUIRIES INTO LEWIS’S DEATH

  Although no documents of the proceedings survive, a local Tennessee county inquest into the matter was conducted after Lewis’s death. Surviving oral histories from county residents claim that a charge of murder against the Grinders and “parties unknown” was returned but then dropped for reasons attributed to the jury’s “fear of retribution.”14

  Shortly afterward, the Grinders disappear from Tennessee. After, it is said, having come into “a substantial sum of money.”

  *IN CONCLUSION

  At the time of his death, Meriwether Lewis was 35 years old, a strong, sturdy individual, t
oughened by years in the military and the wilderness. He had survived deprivations unimaginable by modern men. During the expedition he defended himself and his men courageously in battle with hostiles, in one instance killing four attackers single-handedly. He performed one of the more remarkable services ever rendered to his nation, and his personal friend and patron Thomas Jefferson, in our history. You would need to combine Charles Lindbergh, John Glenn and Neil Armstrong to conjure a 20th-century figure with a comparable impact on the national psyche.

  Proving himself an able political leader during his time as governor, Lewis might one day have succeeded his mentor as president, a job for which many believe Jefferson was grooming him. One has to look ahead to the assassinations of Lincoln and Kennedy to find a more shocking loss of such a universally admired public figure.

  Under confidential orders from the president, Lewis traversed an untamed wilderness and returned triumphant. Based on my recent findings it is reasonable that Jefferson sent Lewis not only to find a “Northwest Passage” to the Pacific--history’s standard narrative--but to investigate many strange rumors and claims stemming from this region: an unknown tribe of “white Indians,” the existence of fabulous gold and silver mines, the possible existence of mastodons, sea monsters and other quasi-mythical beasts, as well as traces of ancient, vanished civilizations, including a mysterious race of giants.15

  On at least one occasion, referenced earlier, it seems Lewis encountered mysteries peculiar to this corner of the world, the upper Northwest. Mysteries that, this correspondent can personally confirm, persist to this day.16