“His name merits an honored place in the American saga, rather than being consigned to a historical dumpster or maligned by revisionists.”
ON APRIL 26, 1813, Brigadier General Zebulon Pike landed on the northern shore of Lake Ontario just outside of York (present day Toronto) at the head of a 1,700-man army.
After securing a beachhead, Pike personally led three rifle companies under heavy enemy fire to drive back British and native forces sent against him. It was the first American land victory of the 10-month-old War of 1812.
Pike had just finished helping a wounded private off the field when a British officer from the nearby Fort York approached, sent to negotiate a British surrender. Inside the walls of the stronghold, defenders had laid a fuse to detonate the powder magazine to keep it from falling into American hands. The depot exploded prematurely and sent debris high into the air where it rained down on the American column, killing 49 and wounding 180. Among the casualties were the British emissary, who was killed outright, and Pike himself, who was struck on the back with a large stone block. The wounded general was transported back to a vessel anchored offshore. He died the next day, but not before urging his men to complete their victory.
Anger over Pike’s death led the American troops to ignore their orders to be civil to the local population. Instead, they plundered York and burned the town to the ground. The destruction of York, along with the razing of other settlements in Upper Canada, was the motivation for the British burning Washington, D.C. the following year.
Thirty-four-year-old Zebulon Pike’s sudden and unexpected death cut short a career that had rippled with drama, one in which he played many parts. Best known as an explorer — although his legacy is less celebrated than that of his contemporaries Meriwether Lewis and William Clark — he was also a soldier, diplomat, cartographer, scientist, and writer. Well-known in the 19th century, he has been largely forgotten in the 21st save for Pike’s Peak in Colorado, a summit that he viewed but neither climbed nor named.
During his lifetime, he was falsely accused of being part of Aaron Burr’s conspiracy to create a Southwestern Empire. More recently, he’s been the victim of unfair attacks by 21st century iconoclast commentators who have characterized him as a dim martinet with a penchant for precipitate action. National Park Service Ranger David S. Wiggins has called him a “B-grade Lewis and Clark,” and a “19th Century Frank Burns,” (referring to the overbearing, inept surgeon in the TV series M*A*S*H), while one particularly unkind historian labelled him a “puffed up little popinjay with pretensions to greatness.”
Yet the evidence shows Pike was a skilled soldier, a resourceful leader, and a more than competent explorer. His name has been unfairly tarnished, and his reputation deserves rehabilitation.
Zebulon Montgomery Pike was born in New Jersey in 1779, the son of a Revolutionary War colonel, and spent his formative years on army posts in Ohio. Five feet 8 inches in height, with a slim physique, sharp features, and striking blue eyes, in his teens he served three years as a cadet, during which he participated in shadowing a force of French spies traversing the Northwest. He was commissioned a second lieutenant at age 20, serving at Fort Massac and Fort Kaskaskia in the Illinois country. He became the protégé of General James Wilkinson, who had been a friend of his father’s.
Wilkinson was the commander of the U.S. Army, the governor of the Louisiana Territory, and “Agent 13” of the Spanish secret service. He was regularly passing on classified information to the Spanish in exchange for large sums of money.
Pike had no knowledge of Wilkinson’s treachery; nevertheless, when Wilkinson was implicated in Aaron Burr’s 1808 plot to detach part of the United States to form an independent empire, suspicion fell on his young protégé. In 1809, Secretary of War Henry Dearborn formally cleared Pike of any involvement in Burr’s scheme, but some historians apparently did not read the memo.
Pike was 26 when, in 1805, Wilkinson assigned him to explore the upper Mississippi Valley, as part of a series of expeditions envisioned by President Thomas Jefferson to investigate and assess the new Louisiana Purchase, which more than doubled the territory of the United States. Unlike the Lewis and Clark Expedition, which was Jefferson’s pet project, approved and funded in advance by Congress, Pike’s expedition was Wilkinson’s initiative, and the budget was paid for out of his Governor’s funds. The expedition departed from St Louis, Missouri, on August 9th, 1805, and returned on April 30, 1806.
Wilkinson was well within his rights as the territorial governor to send out such an expedition, and he formally notified the secretary of war of his intentions. Dearborn presumably told President Jefferson, so 21st century claims that Pike’s Expedition was illegal, and that he had no authority to make land purchases, are groundless.
As further proof of Pike’s legitimacy, Congress approved reimbursement of Pike’s expenses in 1807, and in 1808 Congress endorsed the Treaty of St Peter’s, concluded with the Dakota People in what is now St. Paul, Minnesota on September 23, 1805. Revisionists at the Minnesota Historical Society have made the argument that Jefferson’s failure to “proclaim” the treaty—to publicly make it known far and wide—meant that it lacked authority, but Jefferson’s administration treated the agreement as having the force of law and proceeded accordingly. And No one in authority questioned the treaty’s legitimacy.
In addition to exploring and mapping the upper Mississippi Valley, Pike was charged with ‘showing the flag’: letting trappers, Native Americans, and missionaries know that they were now bound by the laws of the United States. He was also tasked with finding the source of the Mississippi River, locating sites for future military installations and commercial ventures, opening relations with various Native American tribes as well as seeking to limit intertribal warfare, and making sure that British traders in the area were adhering to the terms of Jay’s Treaty of 1794.
Pike and his twenty men logged an estimated 3,000 miles in 264 days, and though he only completed some of his objectives, he made the best possible use of his slender resources.
While he missed finding the source of the Mississippi by 25 miles, Pike purchased 100,000 acres of land from the Dakota People, which later became the site of Fort Snelling and the future cities of St. Paul and Minneapolis.
Rather than being the “ancient homeland of the Dakota,” the purchased territory had only been occupied by that semi-nomadic people for two centuries, when they had been driven south by the Ojibway, who still disputed ownership of parts of the new homeland. Pike’s ability to mediate Native American quarrels was necessarily limited by having only 20 men, and so the Dakota and Ojibwe continued to fight their tribal skirmishes.
The purchase price was 60 gallons of rum, $200 worth of trade goods, and $6,000 in coin, which was paid years later in two installments. Two chiefs signed the agreement, and while others chose not to, all 150 Dakota present shared in the liquor and trade goods that Pike offered.
The Treaty of St. Peter’s, like most such treaties, suffered from poor translations rendered by linguists who spoke only pidgin versions of English and Native American tongues, and so both sides were likely ignorant of the nuances of what they were signing. In addition, as a semi-nomadic people, the Dakota had different views about land ownership than Americans and Europeans; this confusion often led to armed conflicts. Contemporary claims that the land constituted holy ground do not seem to have been a concern of the Dakota at the time of the treaty. When Major Stephen Long arrived in 1817, intending to build a fort on the land that Pike had purchased, he met with several Dakota tribesmen who remembered the agreement and raised no questions as to its validity.
During his time in the territory, Pike met with various fur trappers of the British Northwest Company and informed them that failure to pay customs duties and fees at Fort Mackinac would result in their ejection from United States territory. He personally shot down the Union Jack flags flying from the various British trading posts to make his point about the land’s new management. Despite this, he seems to have gotten on well with British traders; they helped him on several occasions.
By the time he returned to St. Louis on April 30, 1806, Pike had mapped large sections of Minnesota, Iowa, and Illinois. While his cartographic skills were rudimentary compared with those of Lewis and Clark, he greatly improved the geographical knowledge of the upper Mississippi. Unlike Lewis and Clark, his expedition was not equipped to bring back numerous samples of the area’s flora and fauna, so the scientific value of his explorations was minimal.
The complaints lodged against Pike by modern historians center on his harsh and high-handed methods. He once beat a soldier for losing a flag and compelled the entire expedition to backtrack 30 miles to find it. A zealous non-drinker himself, a rarity in the U.S. Army, he was known to sometimes hide in the bushes to catch soldiers stealing unauthorized shots of whiskey. When an unsupervised sergeant drained the contents of a whiskey barrel, Pike reduced him to private. He once enjoyed the hospitality of a British trader for 10 days, even borrowing a set of his clothes, before launching into a tirade at his benefactor for selling illegal goods to the local Ojibway.
Pike’s actions are best understood in the context of the hard conditions in which he lived: His job was to complete a multi-faceted and difficult mission with troublesome soldiers who required stern discipline. Flags were considered near sacred items, and he wanted to impress upon his men the seriousness of losing their own standard, since showing the flag was an intrinsic part of establishing the U.S. presence. Furthermore, captured flags could be misused. And alcohol abuse was a huge problem in America’s emerging military, necessitating strict oversight.Drinking too much whiskey in harsh winter conditions was an easy way to freeze to death, so his measures were neither ridiculous nor unduly harsh, but lifesaving.
Pike also saved the expedition several times when it was near starvation. He was a crack shot and killed enough deer and buffalo to see his men through the hardest times. During the coldest part of a brutal winter, he headed a small group that went ahead to light a large campfire so that the men arriving later would be saved from the dangers of frostbite.
Pike’s robust ego was hardly uncommon among U.S. Army officers, who regarded themselves as part of a select brotherhood. Contemporaries characterized him as straitlaced and punctilious about personal honor, and so, he had much in common with General George S. Patton. While he described his men as “damned rascals,” he took good care of them like the Duke of Wellington, who once called his men “the scum of the earth.” And his men clearly thought well of him: the veterans of his first expedition all volunteered for his second expedition. That is not the behavior of men who resent or despise their officer. Pike’s contemporaries also described him as brave, daring, and indefatigable, and o. One critic admitted that he had the stamina of an ox. In his private life, he was known as a dutiful son, a loving husband, and a devoted father.
Pike was promoted to captain while on the upper Mississippi, and impressed Wilkinson sufficiently that in July 1806, he dispatched him and 23 men on a second mission of exploration, this time to the southwest portion of the Louisiana Purchase where he was tasked with determining the exact boundaries of that new acquisition, while also finding the headwaters of the Red and Arkansas Rivers. As an added duty, he was charged with opening diplomatic relations with representatives of the area’s indigenous peoples.
The limits of the Louisiana Purchase were contested by the Spanish in Santa Fe. While it is uncertain whether Pike was intended to be more a spy than an explorer, he ended up acting as both.
Wilkinson at this time was involved in Burr’s conspiracy to create a personal empire, and taking control of a section of Spanish America was part of that plan though he continued to sell information to the Spanish. Just as he had done when Lewis and Clark and four other expeditions set forth, Wilkinson alerted Spanish authorities to the presence of an unwanted American survey team. While the Spanish stopped the other four expeditions, they missed nabbing Lewis and Clark. They did, however, capture Pike in February of 1807 and confiscated all his papers and equipment.
In the time before his capture, Pike had explored the Great Plains and ventured into what are now Kansas, Colorado, and New Mexico, enduring blizzards and near starvation. He called the Great Plains a desert, a mistaken characterization that discouraged settlement, but he also mapped a route that would become the basis for the Santa Fe Trail, a future key trading artery. During this time, Pike lost only a single man, and several times saved the expedition with his hunting skills.
As a prisoner of the Spanish, Pike was treated honorably as an officer and became good friends with the man assigned to escort him, Lieutenant Facundo Milgares, and was transported over hundreds of miles to his base in Chihuahua, Mexico. Along the way, Pike carried out an impromptu reconnaissance, making careful observations of New Spain’s geography, culture, economy, population, and military capabilities.
When Milgares returned Pike to the U.S. at Natchitoches, Louisiana in late 1807, Pike brought with him a wealth of information. Much of it was published in 1810 as An Account of Expeditions to the Source of the Mississippi and Through the Western Portions of Louisiana. His book preceded the publication of the Journals of Lewis and Clark by four years and was widely read, as well as being translated into several languages.
Once cleared of any connection to Burr’s conspiracy, Pike showed himself to be an exemplary officer and advanced rapidly in an army that numbered only 5,000 officers and men. He was promoted to major in 1808 and lieutenant-colonel in 1809. He performed outstandingly at the Battle of Tippecanoe in 1811, under future president William Henry Harrison. With the outbreak of the War of 1812, he was advanced to full colonel and given a regiment of his own. His reputation attracted a wealth of volunteers, and after training on Staten Island, his men were transferred to northern New York state preparatory to an attack on Montreal.
Promoted brigadier general in 1813, his victory at York won him a fame that gradually diminished as the 19th century wore on, along with the memory of his considerable exploring accomplishments. By the 21st century, the bicentennial of his first exploration went unnoted, while the 200th anniversary of the Lewis and Clark Expedition was celebrated with great fanfare.
While Pike’s accomplishments fall short of those of Lewis and Clark, he does not deserve to be dismissed and forgotten. If Lewis and Clark’s achievements were gold, Pike’s accomplishments were at least silver. While he made significant mistakes and got lost several times, he was no blundering fool. He accomplished most of the goals that had been set for him. He deserves credit for wringing the maximum return from very small budgets, and though not a brilliant explorer, he was a capable one who added a great deal to the existing knowledge of the western United States. His name merits an honored place in the American saga, rather than being consigned to a historical dumpster or maligned by revisionists partisans.
John Danielski is the author of eight books chronicling the adventures of Royal Marine Thomas Pennywhistle during the Napoleonic Wars. The newest title in the series is Destination Waterloo. It is available from Amazon.com. Two new works of the Pennywhistle series — Active’s Measure Revised Edition and The Wraiths of Whistlestop are due out in March. John is a frequent contributor to MilitaryHistoryNow.com.
