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Lewis and Clark Stop celebrating. They don't matter. By David Plotz Posted Friday, August 16, 2002, at 7:40 AM PT The American infatuation with Lewis and Clark grows more fervent with every passing year. The adventurers have become our Extreme Founding Fathers, as essential to American history as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson but a lot more fun. Last month, President Bush announced the Lewis and Clark bicentennial celebration, a three-year, 15-state pageant that begins Jan. 18 in Virginia and could draw as many as 25 million tourists to the Lewis and Clark trail by the time it wraps up...

The United States was a mere 28 years old by the time Meriwether Lewis, William Clark, and the Corps of Discovery were working their way up the Missouri River. In 1804, the men were nearing present-day Doniphan, Kansas. They spotted a stream on the Kansas side of the river, and as Clark writes: “as this Creek has no name, and this day is the 4th of July, we name this Independence us. [U.S.] Creek.” That night, they camped at a spot which Clark called “one of the most butifull [beautiful] Plains, I ever Saw.” They would dub the area “Joe...

Famous Explorer's Relatives Deny Suicide Talk, Seek to Dig Up Body Meriwether Lewis conquered rivers, mountains and bears leading the Lewis and Clark Expedition across 8,000 miles of wilderness from St. Louis to the Pacific Ocean and back. Two centuries later, relatives of Mr. Lewis are having a tough time moving his remains down 80 miles of paved Tennessee highway from a national park to a forensic lab. Mr. Lewis's body rests beneath a 20-foot-high stone monument at milepost 385.9 of the Natchez Trace Parkway. A plaque next to the gravesite states that it was here, in 1809, three years...

American History Exhumed by: Alana Goodman, July 10, 2009 On October 11, 1809, celebrated explorer Meriwether Lewis—of Lewis and Clarke fame—was found shot to death on the floor of an old tavern at the edge of Indian country in Tennessee. Witnesses and friends traveling with the explorer maintained that Lewis shot himself in the head and chest after a long bought of mental illness and depression. However, some of Lewis’ family members argued that he was murdered in cold blood. Two-hundred years later his descendents are still dead-set on solving the mystery, even if it means digging up and studying...

The foundation marked Gormley’s achievement with a donation of books — seven volumes of the journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition — to the Tomlinson Library at Mesa State College. The journals of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark... were edited by Gary Moulton and published by the University of Nebraska Press. They are known among today’s historians as the best and most current version of the duo’s journey through the American West. Mesa State College Library Director Elizabeth Brodak said the fact that the books are forms of primary source material... “Anyone who wishes to get that flavor for...