The expedition was extraordinarily well run. Only one soldier died throughout the entire trip - and most likely because of appendicitis, something that would have proved fatal in Philadelphia as well as Council Bluffs.
His snide remark about not "killing Indians (much)" shows he knows nothing about Indians nor the expedition. It's not entirely settled whether Meriwhether Lewis killed himself - while he was prone to bouts of depression and was in severe debt, there is some evidence he was murdered in Tennessee.
Actually, the evidence that Lewis committed suicide is pretty overwhelming. In the month before his death he had made two unsuccessful suicide attempts, and he was behaving very erratically in the hours before his death. Lewis, who survived his wounds for several hours, never once mentioned an attacker. Everybody at the time, including Lewis's own mother and his friend William Clark, concluded that his death was a suicide.
You can always pick out a New Republic contrarian deconstructionist handjob; they concede the main point and then drag in a crate of irrelovent revisionist nitpicking. The fact that this was done in 1802, and not 1842 is kind of lost on the nitwit.
Thankfully, I quit reading that rag; I can often predict what theyre going to say before they say it.