Family keeps digging for centuries-old truth

The small band of travelers rode north on the Natchez Trace, winding through the Tennessee wilderness en route to Washington, D.C. Leading them was Meriwether Lewis, who just three years earlier had helped blaze a trail to the Pacific Ocean, cementing his fame and power in a young America. On this journey in October 1809, Lewis' heart was heavy with problems. He was sick and in financial straits. The task of completing his Lewis and Clark Expedition journals weighed on the 35-year-old explorer, as did the politics of the day. He and a pair of servants stopped at a two-room inn made of logs, on the trace about 60 miles from Nashville. Hours after they settled in, two shots rang out in the night. By morning, Lewis was dead, and a 200-year mystery was born: Did he take his own life, or did thieves or political enemies murder him? Lewis' modern-day relatives have spent years seeking permission from a reluctant federal government to remove his body from its Tennessee grave, examine it and answer the question once and for all. Now they're pushing even harder — hiring a publicist, launching a Web site and opening new lines of dialogue with the National Park Service, the agency that would permit the exhumation...Tennessean