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In the writing trade, you take your angles where you can find them, and recently I realized that this winter marks the 190th anniversary of the first documented visit to Colorado by American citizens.
Those citizens were under the command of Captain Zebulon Montgomery Pike (he was a first lieutenant when his expedition left St. Louis on July 15, 1806, but his promotion came through while he was wandering around out here).
As a history buff, I figured I'd read up on Pike's trip. My preliminary knowledge essentially covered two things. I've read the roadside historical marker a few miles north of town noting the Christmas celebration with eight fresh-killed bison in 1806.
And I knew that even though he tried, Pike didn't climb Pikes Peak, which he called the Grand Peak; it had long been known to the Spanish as El Capitan, and it's such a landmark that every tribe within 250 miles must have also had a name for the massif. The first recorded climb was by Edwin James of the Long expedition in 1820, and Major Stephen Long thus called it James Peak in his reports.
But John Charles Frémont, in reporting his 1843
visit, wrote July 10 -- Snow fell heavily on the
mountains during the night, and Pike's peak this morning is
luminous and grand, covered from the summit, as low down as
we can see, with glittering white.
There's even a
picture.
(To save the James name, it went to a peak in the Front Range he never climbed -- if you've ridden through the Moffat Tunnel, you've been through James Peak).
Frémont offers no explanation about Pike's
peak,
and so the name must have been in common use
then. And it has been so ever since.
Well, not quite. Frémont called it Pike's
peak.
But the U.S. Board of Geographic Names does not
like apostrophes, and thus inflicts solecisms like Pikes
Peak
and Browns Canyon
upon us. What's the point
of having an official language if our own government
refuses to employ the proper genitive for Pike?
Anyway, I started to read up on Pike, and discovered
that there's not all that much to read: A biography, The
Lost Pathfinder,
published in 1949. A book examining
his precise route in Colorado. And his journals, originally
published in 1810 and fortunately available now in
reprint.
That's basically it for Pike. For every book you can
find about Pike, there must be a hundred about the
contemporary expedition of Merriwether Lewis and William
Clark, most recently Undaunted Courage
by Stephen
Ambrose.
This raises an interesting question. Why does mainstream America pay so much attention to Lewis and Clark, and so little to Pike?
I grant that Lewis and Clark were better writers -- their letters are generally innocent of the romantic bombast that Pike employed. But the literary merit of adventurers doesn't explain this, or else the barely literate Daniel Boone would be a footnote, not a folk hero.
Nor can it be that the Lewis and Clark expedition was a greater ordeal. Sure, the Lewis and Clark men ate their share of dog meat and those portages could be brutal, but I defy any modern Iron-man jock to match what Pike and his men did -- march for days in subzero weather through three feet of snow, often with empty bellies, carrying 70-pound packs, wearing rawhide moccasins.
Nor is it that Lewis and Clark succeeded in their goal whereas Pike failed in his order to find the source of the Red River. Lewis and Clark were supposed to find a water route to the Pacific, and they didn't.
So why are Lewis and Clark in every schoolbook and the continued subject of admiring historians, while Pike languishes in near-oblivion?
Here's one answer. Merriwether Lewis operated under Thomas Jefferson's direct authority, and his expedition was fairly straightforward.
Pike operated under orders from Gen. James Wilkinson, one of the great scoundrels of American history. Based in St. Louis, Wilkinson was governor of Louisiana Territory. He was also on the Spanish payroll, and tipped off the colonial authorities in Santa Fe so they could try stopping Lewis and Clark. Wilkinson was also conspiring with Aaron Burr to form an empire of their own in the West -- this led to Burr's trial for treason in 1807.
Dealing with Pike means dealing with Burr and Wilkinson, as well as with Pike's arrest in the San Luis Valley -- an American force invading what was then a foreign country, perhaps to spy for Wilkinson.
In other words, it's hard to make an unvarnished hero out of Pike, despite his considerable fortitude and courage. Lewis and Clark are far simpler to deal with.
Modern America likes its history simple -- complications
come from those nasty revisionists who don't always put
figures from the past in the best light.
And so
Lewis and Clark are great explorers, while Pike is just a
mountain he didn't climb.
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