# Captain James House to Frederick Bates, Nashville, 28 September 1809 — FRAGMENTS ONLY (SUMMARY + quoted phrases) CITATION (primary): James House to Frederick Bates, Nashville, 28 Sept. 1809, Frederick Bates Papers, Missouri History Museum (Missouri Historical Society), St. Louis. NOT printed in Thomas M. Marshall, ed., The Life and Papers of Frederick Bates (1926) (checked: vol. 2 OCR contains no such letter). Quoted by Vardis Fisher, Suicide or Murder? (1962), p. 87; Thomas C. Danisi, Uncovering the Truth about Meriwether Lewis (2012); Starrs & Gale, The Death of Meriwether Lewis (2009). CITATIONS (secondary texts used here): (A) John Danisi and Thomas C. Danisi, "Uncovering Jefferson's Account of Lewis's Mysterious Death," We Proceeded On 38:4 (Nov. 2012), pp. 18-19 and n. 2 — the authors state that "All the documentary evidence that appears in the block quotations of the article is an exact copy of the text and letters in the original"; (B) Kira Gale, "A Cold Case Mystery," We Proceeded On 42:4 (Nov. 2016), pp. 22-26 and n. 19 (Gale is a murder-theory advocate; her paraphrase is included only for the additional details it reports). URL fetched: https://lewisandclark.org/wpo/pdf/vol38no4.pdf ; https://lewisandclark.org/wpo/pdf/vol42no4.pdf (text extracted with PyMuPDF) DATE FETCHED: 2026-09-14 TRANSCRIPTION: FRAGMENT. Only the phrases inside quotation marks below are House's words as quoted by these authors; everything else is the authors' paraphrase. The full letter was NOT obtained (the manuscript is unpublished except in in-copyright books that were not reachable). SUMMARY of what the fragments establish: House, an army captain recently furloughed from Fort Bellefontaine and travelling east, wrote from Nashville on 28 Sept. 1809 that Major Amos Stoddard had met a man "immediately from the Bluffs" who reported that Governor Lewis had arrived at Fort Pickering "in a state of mental derangement" and "that he had made several attempts to put an end to his own existence", which the informant had prevented; that Captain Russell had taken Lewis into his own quarters and was keeping "a strict watch over him to prevent his committing violence on himself and had caused his boat to be unloaded and the key to be secured in his stores." ---- (A) Danisi & Danisi, WPO 38:4 (Nov. 2012), pp. 18-19, verbatim as extracted ---- LEWIS'S CONTEMPORARIES AND HISTORIANS: LEWIS'S DERANGEMENT OR DEPRESSION OF MIND::· Two weeks before Lewis's death, U. S. Army Captain James House wrote to Secretary Frederick Bates, the acting territorial governor of the Louisiana Territory. House was stationed at Fort Bellefontaine in St. Louis from 1806 to 1809. Recently furloughed, House was traveling east when an alarming incident concerning Lewis occurred 18 ~ We Proceeded On November 2012 on September 15, 1809. 1 In his September 28, 1809 letter to Bates, House related that a person from Chickasaw Bluffs told him "that Governor Lewis had arrived there [at Fort Pickering] ... in a state of mental derangement [and] that he had made several attempts to put an end to his own existence. "2 In letters, Captain Gilbert Russell and Major James Neelly corroborated House's hearsay statements when they chronicled their interactions with Lewis. In an October 18, 1809 letter to Jefferson, Neelly wrote that Lewis "appeared at times deranged in mind," a few days after leaving Fort Pickering, and that he regarded Lewis's symptoms of derangement at Grinder's Inn as the central factor in his death, "by suicide. "3 In Russell's legal affidavit recorded November 26, 1811, Russell stated that Lewis arrived at the Fort in "a state of mental derangement" produced "as much by''indisposition as other causes." But ...r before he could be prevented, he "made two attempts to Kill himself. "4 Russell also reported [footnote 2 of the article:] 2J ames House to Frederick Bates, September 28, 1809, Frederick Bates Papers, Missouri History Museum, St. Louis, Missouri; Thomas C. Danisi, Uncovering the Truth about Meriwether ---- (B) Gale, WPO 42:4 (Nov. 2016), pp. 23-24, verbatim as extracted ---- Was Frederick Bates involved? Before Lewis left Fort Pickering on September 29, Captain James House in Nashville wrote a letter to Frederick Bates in St. Louis. Dated September 28, House reported to Bates that Major Amos Stoddard, while traveling to Nashville, had met a man “imme- diately from the Bluffs” who said Lewis was in a state of mental derangement, and that he had made several attempts at suicide that this person had prevented. It continued with the information that Captain Russell had taken Lewis into his own quarters and was keep- ing “a strict watch over him to prevent his commit- ting violence on himself and had caused his boat to be unloaded and the key to be secured in his stores.”4 There are two clues in this letter indicating House and Bates were involved in the conspiracy. First, the identity of the man who saved Lewis from “sev- eral attempts to put an end to his own existence” is not revealed. The real purpose of the letter—other than confirming the mental derangement and sui- cide attempts stories—is to tell Bates where the key to the locked room could be found. Frederick Bates, the territorial secretary, was serving as acting governor in Lewis’s absence. He was a known enemy of Lewis. It appears that Captain House was also part of the con- spiracy. It is another piece of evidence that Lewis was carrying documents they did not want examined by the federal government. [footnote 19 of the article:] 19. House to Bates letter: Frederick Bates Collection, Missouri His- tory Museum. The hearsay account is contained in a letter from Cap- tain James House to Frederick Bates, dated Nashville, September 28, 1809. Starrs and Gale, Death of Meriwether Lewis. William Clark to Jonathan Clark letter: The letters William Clark received are docu- mented in Holmberg, Dear Brother, letter from William Clark to his brother Jonathan, November 26, 1809, 228-33. Russell Statement: Jackson, Letters, #346, Statement of Gilbert C. Russell, November