Zebulon Pike

Zebulon Montgomery Pike was born January 5, 1779, in Lamington, New Jersey, the son of an Army officer of the same name who had served since the Revolution's second year. There was no settled childhood — the family moved between frontier garrisons in Ohio and Illinois, and whatever schooling Pike got came in snatches between postings. He entered the Army under his father's command in his teens, was commissioned a second lieutenant in 1799, and spent his twenties on the unglamorous side of soldiering: payroll, requisitions, supply runs out of Fort Belle Fontaine near St. Louis. In 1801, at twenty-two, he married his first cousin, Clarissa Harlow Brown. He was still an obscure logistics officer, six years from any expedition, when Upper Louisiana's governor took notice of him.

Pike's two expeditions and everything that followed — the 1805 push toward the Mississippi's source, the 1806-07 journey into the disputed Southwest, the mountain he sighted and could not climb, his arrest and months in Spanish custody, and his death leading the assault on York in 1813 — are BriefHistory's story, told in full there. What follows is the life around that record: the frontier boyhood that built the officer, the question historians still argue about what he was really doing out there, and the fame that only caught up with him after he was gone.

Historians have spent two centuries on the same question: was Pike an explorer who stumbled into arrest, or a scout mapping Spanish defenses ahead of an invasion his patron, General James Wilkinson, may have quietly been preparing? The documentary record favors the second reading more than the schoolbook version admits. Whatever the answer, the life Pike had chosen left little room for anything else. He and Clarissa had five children, and four of them died before adulthood; only one daughter survived, marrying into the family of William Henry Harrison. Pike himself never tested what an ordinary domestic life might have looked like — released by the Spanish in July 1807, he was back in uniform and back on campaign within a year, and stayed there until a Canadian magazine ended it.

Pike published his own account of both expeditions in 1810, and it sold well enough to appear in Dutch, French, and German editions before most Americans had heard of the mountain he saw and failed to climb. That head start on fame outlasted him. After his death, towns and counties from Alabama to Pennsylvania took his name, along with the national forest that still carries it through central Colorado. In 1901, Colorado Springs founder William Jackson Palmer commissioned a bronze-and-marble statue of Pike for the entrance of the Antlers Hotel. None of it settled the argument the officer left behind about what, exactly, he had been sent out there to do.

Zebulon Pike's life against the full span of the corpus.

• An Account of Expeditions to the Sources of the Mississippi book
  His own narrative of both expeditions, translated into Dutch, French, and German 1810
• Mississippi River Expedition mission
  Ordered by General James Wilkinson to find the river's source 1805
• Southwest Expedition mission
  Into the disputed borderlands of the Louisiana Purchase, ending in Spanish arrest 1806
• Fort Snelling land cession other
  Negotiated the Dakota land cession that later became the fort site 1805
• Battle of York mission
  Commanded the American assault that captured York, Upper Canada 1813

• January 5, 1779 aged 0 Born in Lamington, New Jersey
• 1799 aged ~20 Commissioned second lieutenant
• 1801 aged ~22 Marries his cousin, Clarissa Harlow Brown
• April 1805 aged 26 Departs on the Mississippi River expedition Ordered by General James Wilkinson to find the river's source.
• February 1807 aged 28 Arrested by Spanish authorities in present-day Colorado
• 1810 aged ~31 Publishes his account of both expeditions
• July 1812 aged 33 Promoted colonel of the 15th Infantry Regiment
• March 1813 aged 34 Promoted brigadier general
• April 27, 1813 aged 34 Killed at the Battle of York Struck by debris when a British magazine exploded during the withdrawal.

• William Henry Harrison 1773–1841
  Whig general elected ninth president who died one month into his term. served under
• Thomas Jefferson 1743–1826
  Principal author of the Declaration of Independence and third President who oversaw the Louisiana Purchase. explored territory acquired by
• Kit Carson 1809–1868
  Frontiersman and scout who guided John C. Frémont and became a legend of the American West. succeeded as Western explorer
• John Quincy Adams 1767–1848
  Diplomat, sixth president, and later congressman who opposed slavery’s expansion and shaped early American foreign policy. negotiated boundary after