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Vol. 26:4 ISSN 0160-8460 December 1998
Publishing the Journals of the Unfortunate Zebulon Pike
From the beginning, the NHPRC has had a mission to preserve the important records of this nation and to make them available to the public. In the days before the Commission was a grant-making entity (and before it had and Records added to its name), that mission was in large measure fulfilled by endorsing worthwhile projects and providing staff assistance to those that were researching materials in the National Archives and other Washington repositories. One such project, endorsed by the Commission in 1964, was The Journals of Zebulon Montgomery Pike: With Letters and Related Documents, the two volumes of which were published by the University of Oklahoma Press in 1966 under the editorship of Donald Jackson.
Zebulon Pike was a career army officer and explorer who led two parties of exploration into the lands acquired from France in the Louisiana Purchase in the years 1805-1807. As Donald Jackson put it in his foreword to the first volume of Pike's Journals, nothing Pike "ever tried to do was easy, and most of his luck was bad." In the summer of 1805, General James Wilkinson, commanding the United States Army, ordered Pike to lead a party in search of the source of the Mississippi River. The young lieutenant set out upriver from St. Louis that August in a keelboat with 20 men. Above the Falls of St. Anthony, they left the boat, built a stockade, and continued on foot to what Pike thought was their goal. In this he was mistaken, through no fault of his own. However, the expedition did allow the Americans to visit some British trading posts and hold councils with the Indians in the region, useful developments in terms of asserting United States ownership of the territory in question. Pike's party returned to St. Louis in late April 1806.
General Wilkinson soon had a new assignment for the young explorer. In mid-July 1806, he set out with another party to explore the headwaters of the Arkansas and Red Rivers. The two rivers formed part of the boundary between the lands of the Louisiana Purchase and New Spain, and searching for their headwaters was a matter of legitimate concern to the United States. However, a second part of Pike's instructions, which enjoined him to make a reconnaissance of the Spanish settlements in New Mexico, using great circumspection, amounted to espionage directed against a neighboring country in peacetime.
Pike's party proceeded up the Arkansas River to the vicinity of present-day Pueblo, Colorado, visiting Indian villages along the way. After an unsuccessful attempt to reach the summit of the peak which today bears his name, Pike continued his journey to the source of the Arkansas. He then moved southward in search of the headwaters of the Red River, which according to Baron Alexander von Humboldt's map rose at the foot of the Rocky Mountains near Taos, New Mexico. Pike accordingly crossed the Sangre de Cristo Mountains and built a log fort on a tributary of the Rio Grande River, presumably intending to winter in the area, not far from Taos. Pike's party was in fact far from the actual source of the Red River, which rises in northern Texas.
Upon learning of Pike's presence, the Spanish authorities sent troops to bring him to Santa Fe. This suited Pike fine, since he wished to visit the area and learn something about its geography and natural resources. However, the Spanish commander in Santa Fe decided to turn the matter over to his superior, and sent the Americans to Chihuahua. Pike's party was well treated, but the Spanish kept all Pike's papers. These were returned to the United States in the early 20th century, and are now part of National Archives Record Group 94, Records of the Adjutant General's Office.
The Spanish provided Pike with an escort to the border, and he was back in United States territory by early July. Here he found that he was suspected of being part of the Burr-Wilkinson conspiracy to establish an empire in the Southwest. He protested his innocence to Secretary of War Henry Dearborn, who exonerated him of any wrongdoing. In hindsight, it is clear that Wilkinson may have intended to use any information Pike might provide to further his own plans, but that Pike had no knowledge of the purpose for which the information might be used. Pike's 1806-1807 expedition ranks second in importance to that of Lewis and Clark in terms of knowledge gained about previously unexplored territory, but the courage and endurance of Pike and his men were fully equal to those of the more famous party of exploration.
Portrait of Zebulon Montgomery Pike by Charles Willson Peale, ca. 1807, oil on canvas. From the Independence National Historical Park Collection.
Pike's subsequent career in the army was successful but brief. He had been promoted to the rank of captain according to normal sequence in 1806 while engaged in his expedition, and was made a major in 1808. In 1812, with the advent of the second war with Great Britain, Pike was promoted to the rank of colonel. He was made a brigadier general early in 1813, prior to the invasion of Canada. Pike was in immediate command of the troops that attacked York (now Toronto), Canada, that April. The attack was successful, but Pike was killed when a British powder magazine blew up during the fighting.
Pike's bad luck even survived his death. He and the men who took part in his expeditions were never compensated for their efforts during their lifetimes. Attempts to secure redress by act of Congress lapsed with Pike's death. A trunk filled with Pike's papers was lost in an 1845 house fire. In 1846, Senator Thomas Hart Benton interceded to ensure that Congress passed a bill granting Pike's widow $3,000 in compensation for his services as an explorer, and then had to fend off Treasury Department efforts to attach part of this sum to settle the government's account against Pike.
The Jackson edition of Pike's journals is based upon a book published for Pike in 1810 by the Philadelphia firm of C. & A. Conrad & Co., entitled An Account of Expeditions to the Sources of the Mississippi, and Through the Western Parts of Louisiana, to the Sources of the Arkansaw, Kans, La Platte, and Pierre Jaun, Rivers; Performed by Order of the Government of the United States During the Years 1805, 1806, and 1807. And a Tour Through the Interior Parts of New Spain ... in the Year 1807.
From all indications, Pike would have benefited greatly from a week at Camp Edit. Publisher John Conrad considered Pike's manuscript so poorly organized that he added a note to the author's preface in which he expressed doubt "whether any book ever went to press under so many disadvantages as the one now presented to the public." Part of the problem arose from the fact that Pike felt that he had made three expeditions rather than two, the third being his involuntary journey to and from Chihuahua. He compiled a journal of events for each of the three expeditions, to which he added geographic data, ethnographic material, and related letters, but set forth as appendixes to each of the three parts of the journal. This arrangement of materials would have been fairly confusing, but the situation was aggravated when some items were printed in the wrong sections or out of sequence.
Subsequent editions in 1811 and 1895 attempted to improve matters by rearranging the material. However, Professor Jackson was dealing with an unpublished manuscript version of the Mississippi River expedition, as well as dozens of manuscript letters that were not in the original edition. These circumstances made a reissue of Pike's edition impossible.
Professor Jackson chose to regard every document, whether published or not, as raw material to be annotated and arranged without regard to the original edition. He replaced Pike's published version of the Mississippi River journal with the manuscript version. The letters in Pike's edition were used together with the unpublished ones.
In the Jackson edition, the story of Pike's expeditions is told in three versions: in the journals, the appended reports, and the letters. Jackson's method of dealing with the documentary materials thus eliminates most of the confusion resulting from Pike's original arrangement and earlier publication problems. Although Professor Jackson jokingly remarked that he was tempted to adopt John Conrad's disclaimer as his own, his edition clearly constitutes the most complete and best organized assemblage of materials on Pike's journeys of exploration. More than 150 years after his death, Zebulon Pike's writings have received proper treatment at the hands of posterity.
Pike's manuscript field map of his side trip to Pikes Peak, from the Journals. Photograph by Earl McDonald, NARA.
