"More painful than the rejection, is the displeasure which must arise in the mind of the executive from my having drawn for public moneys without authority. A third and not less embarrassing circumstance is that my private funds are entirely incompetent to meet these bills if protested."
With the generosity of his nature Clark gave Lewis one hundred dollars, and Lewis arranged as soon as possible to go to Washington with his vouchers to see the President.
With the courage of upright convictions, Governor Lewis contended with the difficulties of his office, and in due course received the rest of his protested bills. If he raged at heart he said little. If he spent sleepless nights tossing, and communing with himself, he spoke no word to those around him. Though the dagger pierced he made no sign. Borrowing money of his friends as George Rogers Clark had done, he met his bills as best he might. But his haggard face and evident illness alarmed his friends.
"You had better take a trip to the east," they urged. "You have malarial fever."
He decided to act on this suggestion, and with the journals of the western expedition and his vouchers the Governor bade his friends farewell and dropped down the river, intending to take a coasting vessel to New Orleans and pass around to Washington by sea.
But at the Chickasaw Bluffs, now Memphis, Lewis was ill. Moreover, rumours of war were in the air.
"These precious manuscripts that I have carried now for so many miles, must not be lost," thought Lewis, "nor the vouchers of my public accounts on which my honour rests. I will go by land through the Chickasaw country."
The United States agent with the Chickasaw Indians, Major Neely, arriving there two days later, found Lewis still detained by illness. "I must accompany and watch over him," he said, when he found that the Governor was resolved to press on at all hazards. "He is very ill."
One hundred years ago the Natchez trace was a new military road that had been cut through the wilderness of Tennessee to the Spanish country. Over this road the pony express galloped day and night and pioneer caravans paused at nightfall at lonely wayside inns. Brigands infested the forest, hard on the trail of the trader returning from New Orleans with a pouch of Spanish silver in his saddlebags.
Over that road Aaron Burr had travelled on his visit to Andrew Jackson at Nashville, and on it Tecumseh was even now journeying to the tribes of the south.