Through a retelling of Lewis's life, from his resourceful youth to the brilliance of his leadership and accomplishments as a man, Patricia Tyson Stroud shows that Jefferson's unsubstantiated claim of his protege's suicide is the long-held bitter root at the heart of the Meriwether Lewis story.

Patricia Tyson Stroud is an independent scholar. She is author of Thomas Say: New World Naturalist, The Emperor of Nature: Charles-Lucien Bonaparte and His World, The Man Who Had Been King: The American Exile of Napoleon's Brother Joseph, and, with Robert McCracken Peck, A Glorious Enterprise: The Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia and the Making of American Science, all of which are available from the University of Pennsylvania Press.