s 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.
"Two of the horses have strayed," was the servant's report at the end of one day's journey. But even that could not delay the Governor.
"I will wait for you at the house of the first white inhabitant on the road," said Lewis, as Neely turned back for the lost roadsters.
It was evening when the Governor arrived
