Explorer Soldier Conspirator Author - Zebulon M. Pike (1813)

    

         Famed explorer, mapmaker, accused spy, acquitted conspirator, best-selling author, and distinguished soldier, Zebulon Pike (1779-1813) gave his name to a towering mountain and helped chart the vast western territories forming the geographic heart of America. After joining his father’s regiment as a 15-year old cadet, Pike served in the army of General “Mad Anthony” Wayne during the closing stages of the Old Northwest Indian War (1790-1794). For the next decade, he served on the western frontier, taking time to educate himself in Spanish, mathematics, and the natural sciences.

 

       While stationed in the Illinois territory, he attracted the attention of his commanding officer, General James Wilkinson, certainly the most scandalous, amoral, traitorous, incompetent, and thoroughly repugnant soldier ever to wear the uniform of our country, and a commander of whom it was said, he “never won a battle or lost a courts martial.” Wilkinson also had a diverse political career and served as governor of the new Louisiana Territory - acquired from Napoleon in 1803 – and was anxious to explore and personally exploit it, as well as consolidate the American hold over the vast new domain against its enemies.

       In August 1805, Wilkinson selected Pike to explore the headwaters of the Mississippi River and to forcibly assert the claims of the United States primarily against the British, as well as establish contact with the Native American inhabitants. Departing from St. Louis at the head of a party of 20 men, Pike spent eight months exploring the Mississippi, mistakenly claiming Leech Lake in Minnesota as the source of the great river.
  
        One year later, Wilkinson – who was in fact a paid agent of Spain - again dispatched the young lieutenant from St. Louis, this time southwest in search of the headwaters of the Arkansas and Red Rivers and to reconnoiter the Spanish settlements in New Mexico. While passing through Colorado, he unsuccessfully tried to scale a large mountain he called Grand Peak, later renamed ‘Pike’s Peak’ in his honor. Continuing his journey, he was arrested by the Spanish, who took his maps and charts and transported him and his party to Santa Fe, where he was charged with espionage. Eventually released, he returned to the US, where new troubles awaited.

       A loyal federalist who resisted Jefferson’s “democratic” reforms of the army, Pike was suspected of complicity in the Aaron Burr conspiracy, although no firm evidence ever surfaced to support those charges. Pike then returned to the Army and a year later, he published An Account of Expeditions to the Sources of the Mississippi and through the Western Parts of Louisiana. It was the first popular account of exploring the vast Louisiana Territory and appeared four years before the journals of Lewis and Clark were published. His writing is lyrical and the earliest descriptions in English of the lands he explored, as this extract from his journal from January 28th, 1807, "After marching some miles, we discovered ... at the foot of the White Mountains [today’s Sangre de Cristos] which we were then descending, sandy hills…When we encamped, I ascended one of the largest hills of sand, and with my glass could discover a large river [the Rio Grande] …The sand-hills extended up and down the foot of the White Mountains about 15 miles, and appeared to be about 5 miles in width. Their appearance was exactly that of the sea in a storm, except as to color, not the least sign of vegetation existing thereon."

      By the beginning of the War of 1812, Pike had reached the rank Colonel of the 15^th Infantry Regiment (one of the most famous in the US Army) and soon after was named a brigadier general under MG Henry Dearborn in the invasion of Canada. During the storming of York, (now Toronto), Canada, on April 27, 1813, the city’s powder magazine exploded with great force, slamming a large rock into Pike’s back, crushing his ribs and spine. He was carried to a ship anchored on Lake Eire, where he died that same day. Zebulon Pike was the first general in the United States Army to die on foreign soil.