Meriwether Lewis, half of Lewis and Clark and their exploration of the northwest died near our camping spot but not recently. We started out today by stopping in at his grave site and monument just a few miles up the Trace. There seems to be a dispute about how Captain Lewis died. Some say it was suicide because he was remembered as mopey, depressed guy who thought finding a passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific wasn’t enough, and also because he wasn’t married to some rich woman. Other folks seem to think that Lewis’s death was a murder because suicides rarely shoot themselves TWICE and cut their throats, as well. Anybody slicing his own neck, putting one into his head and then one into the abdomen would seem a very determined suicide victim to me.
There is a nice park around Lewis’s monument which is a big broken granite column. Allegedly, a broken column represents a life cut short. The park also has a campground and there is a short road down to the Little Swan River. The river area and the road there are very nice; this is a gorgeous part of Tennessee.
Our explorations then took us a bit east of the Trace to Summertown. The road was bordered by some stunning upland hardwood forests, emerald pastures, tidy farm buildings and a couple of Dogpatch-like estates with multiple stripped single-wide mobile homes, wrecked cars, partially overgrown broken agricultural equipment and numerous dead lawn tractors. The hillbilly tenants grinning from some of the porches appeared dentally challenged and whiter than skim milk.
In Summertown we found Schafer’s Meats and stopped in for very tasty brisket and pulled pork dishes and some meat from the counter. They sell very tubby sausages so I grabbed some. The meat in the case made me salivate unnaturally.
See pix. Click here