block and eventually having creditors on his back became too hard to carry. As a reward for his leadership, Jefferson had granted Lewis the governorship of the Louisiana Territory, but his personal problems overwhelmed him. In the early hours of October 11, 1809, while staying in a boarding house en route to Washington, Meriwether Lewis shot himself. In trying to make sense of it later, Thomas Jefferson wrote of the “depressions of mind” that his young friend had suffered for years. But Jefferson surmised, During his Western expedition, the constant exertion which that required of all the
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