William Clark, coleader of the famous Lewis and Clark Expedition to the Pacific, spent the night of October 28, 1809, at John Shannon's Tavern near present Graefenburg. That day he read that Lewis, his expedition partner, had killed himself in Tennessee. That night Clark wrote a famous letter expressing fear that Lewis had committed suicide, writing, "I fear O! I fear the weight of his mind has overcome him." Lewis died October 11, 1809, seventy miles southwest of Nashville on the Natchez Trace.