Meriwether Lewis, co-leader of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, was one of the few men Jefferson chose to perform spy work, or “secret services” as it was called at the time. Jefferson propelled Lewis’s rise from a Charlottesville, Virginia farm, to a residence in the East Room of the White House, and then to a 3,500-mile intelligence-gathering expedition into the unknown across the Rockies to the Pacific. Lewis and his co-captain, William Clark, returned to become two of the first American popular heroes.

But Jefferson’s next mission for Lewis would prove a challenge he would not overcome. The work to take Spanish-controlled Texas and Santa Fe entangled Lewis in shadowy networks of spies, assassins, and assorted villains along the enemy border. Lewis died carrying sensitive information to Washington on a road so dangerous it was known as “The Devil’s Backbone.” His death remains one of the great American mysteries.

Volume One begins to unravel the mystery.