PIKE, Zebulon Montgomery

Zebulon Pike was an early explorer of the Mississippi and later the American West.

PIKE, Zebulon Montgomery. (Lamberton, NJ, Jan. 5, 1779-Toronto, Canada, 1813).

In 1805, Lewis and Clark were making history on the Missouri River while another explorer was heading up the Mississippi.

Sent by General James Wilkerson, Commander of the Western Army and a double agent for Spain, 26-year-old Lt. Zebulon Pike was assigned to find sites for forts, determine the source of the MISSISSIPPI RIVER, make peace between warring tribes and stop unlicensed British trade. Unlike Lewis and Clark, Pike was not on a voyage of discovery. The French and British had been trading on the Upper Mississippi for more than a century, and Pike had been preceded by Father Louis Hennepin and Jonathan Carver, both of whom wrote accounts of their travels that were widely read in America and Europe. (1)

On August 9, 1805, Pike started from St. Louis with a crew of 20 and a 70-foot keelboat. They headed upriver, dragging the keelboat over sandbars. Pike waited for no one; near Muscatine, Iowa, he abandoned two soldiers who had volunteered to look for his lost dogs. It was only with the help of a Scottish trader and Fox chief that the men caught up to Pike eight days later in Dubuque, Iowa.

He visited Julien DUBUQUE at the MINES OF SPAIN. Dubuque's answers to a written questionnaire gave Pike only a glimpse of the amount of MINING being done in the area. Dubuque was suspicious of the expedition's intentions and gave responses that were carefully vague.

In northeast Iowa, Pike picked a fort site 500 feet above the river, in present-day Pikes Peak State Park. It was built instead on river flats in Prairie du Chien. At Prairie du Chien, he traded the keelboat for barges. He recommended a fort be built on bluffs across the river, at what is now Pikes Peak State Park near McGregor, Iowa, but the fort was built instead on the flats of Prairie du Chien, a fur-trade hub for more than 50 years.

Two days after arriving at the present site of Fort Snelling State Park, Pike met with seven Dakota chiefs and got two of them to sign a treaty that gave him much of modern-day Minneapolis and St. Paul. Pike left the payment amount blank because he had no authority to spend government money; three years later, the government paid $2,000 — to traders who said the Dakota owed them.

Pike was famous for fits of pique as well as peaks. The day after the treaty signing, Pike found his flag missing and had a tantrum, beating one of his soldiers in front of the Dakota. The following day, Little Crow came to tell Pike his flag had been found floating 15 miles downstream, then had two young men deliver it to Pike and his men as they traveled to the Falls of St. Anthony.

It took three days to get the boats around the falls, and Pike drove his men so hard seven became ill and the rest dropped from exhaustion. On October 16th, with temperatures dropping and snow falling, Pike set the men to work building a stockade and making dugout canoes.

Pike was a gifted hunter, often single-handedly supplying his men with meat, and he could cover many miles every day. After he left half his men in Little Falls and traveled north to Leech Lake, he was recklessly brave, often ignoring the warnings of his Indian interpreter. With the help of the British trader from Sandy Lake, he found Leech Lake and the North West Co. fur post there.

After 10 days of enjoying the hospitality of its British proprietor, at one point borrowing his clothes because his own legs were so swollen, Pike repaid him by hoisting the U.S. flag and having his men shoot down the Union Jack. Nevertheless, the trader later accompanied him to another post and gave Pike a guide, snowshoes for all his men and a sleigh and two sled dogs for Pike himself.

Pike stopped again at Dubuque's mines on his return to St. Louis on April 30, 1806.

Amazingly, Pike made it back to St. Louis with all his men. Soon, Gen. James Wilkinson ordered him on another expedition into the Southwest. Pike was captured by the Spanish, likely on purpose, and turned out to be an observant spy. (3) His career, however, was tainted when his mentor, Wilkinson — "one of history's worst scoundrels, according to the National Park Service — was tried for conspiracy with former Vice President Aaron Burr. (4) Pike's possible involvement in the plan to establish an empire separate from the United States in the Southwest was never proven. (5)

Pike's career rebounded with the start of the War of 1812, for which he was made a brigadier general. In 1813, he died in an explosion set by the British in modern-day Toronto; the Americans then burned the town, for which the British retaliated in 1814 by burning the White House and U.S. Capitol. (6)

He became a hero, with various counties and towns around the nation named for him; in 1817, the first steamboat to arrive in St. Louis was the "Pike." (7)

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Source:

1. "For Better or Worse, America's First Emissary on the Upper Mississippi Set History into Motion." Midwest Weekends. Online: http://www.midwestweekends.com/plan_a_trip/history_heritage/frontier_history/pike.html

2. "Zebulon Pike," NNDB-Tracking the Entire World. Online: http://www.nndb.com/people/570/000050420/

3. Lt. Zebulon Pike's Diary: New Mexico, Chihuahua & Texas. Online: http://www.tamu.edu/faculty/ccbn/dewitt/pikejour.htm

4. Stewart, David O. American Emperor: Aaron Burr's Challenge to Jefferson's America, New York: Simon and Schuster, 2011

5. Pike, Zebulon Montgomery. Texas State Historical Association. Online: http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/fpi19

6. "For Better or Worse..."

7. Ibid.