[In the following review, Daniels describes Murder or Suicide? as a “fascinating work of historical detection,” but observes that Fisher fails to address broader questions raised by the story.]

The news did not come rapidly in those days from such a Far West as Tennessee. Much time passed before the young country which had properly made him a national hero knew that Meriwether Lewis had died a violent death at Grinder's Stand on the old dangerous trail called the Natchez Trace. Even today, more than 150 years later, the clear straight story has not come into the history books as to whether Lewis was murdered or committed suicide that October night in 1809.

Thomas Jefferson, who had sent Lewis with William Clark on the great Lewis and Clark expedition to the Pacific, gave his verdict confidently four years after the death that it was suicide due to inherited “hypochrondriac affections.” Others since then have not been so sure and in recent years historical argument has grown about the question, “murder or suicide?” which Vardis Fisher has made the title of this book [Murder or Suicide?].

Nowhere at such length and in such detail has the evidence been so arrayed as in this fascinating work of historical detection. Mr. Fisher has not only studied the scene and the documents; he has also studied the characters who were on the scene and those who prepared the documents upon which various historical verdicts have been rendered. On the basis of vast research, he historically cross-examines every witness, including Jefferson who, of course, never visited the death scene. After this thorough and careful search, Mr. Fisher, while aware of the impossibility of absolute certainty, inclines to the view that Lewis was murdered. So do I.

My only fault with the book is that Mr. Fisher did not examine—and probably could not have examined in the scope of his story—all the widening circle of historical questions which spread from the scene of this death in the wilderness. Bigger questions than “murder or suicide?” seem to be involved. On the basis of the evidence, it seems doubtful to me that this was one of those killings for cash on the Natchez Trace for which that trail became notorious.

Of course, it may have been suicide. Perhaps Mr. Jefferson merely reported the facts when he said that he had always known that the man, to whom he entrusted the greatest enterprises, was congenitally maladjusted. Considering his own family, Mr. Jefferson could have been an expert on congenital derangements. Still if Lewis came mentally disturbed to the lonely place where he died, he also came from St. Louis. And St. Louis then was a human wilderness which contained the tracks of Aaron Burr, of the traitor General James Wilkinson, and of the furiously jealous and evidently agitated Frederick Bates, deputy governor under Lewis. Some of the ties between them are still as mysterious as the death of Lewis, whose body was left for years in a grave unprotected from the wolves and the hogs. It is at least possible that Lewis knew too much about matters which even Jefferson preferred be forgotten.