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At the post office the other day, I got some change, and
one of the shiny nickels looked odd. The clerk helpfully
explained that it was one of the new Buffalo Nickels
which honor the bicentennial of the 1804-06 expedition of
the American Corps of Discovery, led by William Clark and
Meriwether Lewis.
There's another Lewis and Clark nickel scheduled for later this year, and the mint issued a Sacajawea dollar coin in 2000, to honor the Shoshone woman who helped that expedition find its way. The portrait on that coin also represented one of the great moments in coinage creativity, since no one has any idea what Sacajawea really looked like.
Just a month ago, the Postal Service issued three Lewis and Clark stamps, and there are a host of re-enactments, tours, festivals and the like all along their route from St. Louis to the mouth of the Columbia River and back.
Not to take anything away from Lewis and Clark, but it does seem astonishing that America devotes so much attention to their bicentennial, while essentially ignoring the bicentennial of another American expedition into the West.
That, of course, is the 1806-07 trek led by Lt. Zebulon Montgomery Pike from St. Louis to the Arkansas River to its source in the highest of the Rocky Mountains, then into the San Luis Valley and his capture by Spanish soldiers. Anyone who has read Pike's journals (which are, of course, out of print) cannot help but be astonished by the pluck and perseverance that it took to march barefoot in the Rockies in the dead of winter.
There are some commemorations planned by the Santa Fe Trail Association and the Colorado Springs Pioneer Museum. But there are no stamps, no coins, no TV specials, no acts of Congress -- as far as the national agenda is concerned, Pike never lived, even if he died in service to his country, leading a charge at Toronto during the War of 1812.
Why is it that America loves Lewis and Clark, and ignores Pike? My best guess, after years of sober contemplation, is that Lewis and Clark fit the traditional notions of American virtue -- they were just trying to find a route, make deals with the Indians along the way, and add to the store of scientific knowledge.
In other words, they fit the Republican notion that our
history classrooms should teach the nobility of
America,
rather than what actually happened. The local
right-thinkers certainly won't criticize a high-school
history teacher for addressing Lewis and Clark.
Now consider Pike. He led two expeditions -- one to find the source of the Mississippi, another to find the start of the Red River (now known to be in the Panhandle of Texas but then assumed to be in our mountains) -- and failed at both.
Pike's motives are mysterious to this day, for he could have been part of a conspiracy that led to former vice-president Aaron Burr's trial for treason in 1807.
Lewis and Clark got their orders directly from President Thomas Jefferson, but Pike's orders came from Gen. James Wilkinson, governor of Louisiana Territory.
Wilkinson was supposed to be defending America as tensions grew with Spain, which then ruled over a big chunk of our West. But Wilkinson was also on the Spanish payroll, and he conspired with Burr toward raising a private army so they could set up their own empire on this side of the Mississippi.
To this day, historians argue about whether Pike was an honest soldier of the United States, or a spy sent by Wilkinson to examine Spanish defenses along that empire's northern frontier, and whether that spying was for the benefit of Wilkinson, the U.S. Army officer, or Wilkinson, the Burr conspirator.
Pike's story is not a simple one, and we don't know a lot of it. But Pike cannot be addressed without delving into conspiracies, double agents, secret payrolls, ambiguities, multiple motives, disputed boundaries, espionage and treason.
It is for this reason, I suspect, that schoolbooks gloss over Pike if they mention him at all. The politics of the Pike expedition are vastly more interesting than those of the Corps of Discovery, but Pike is just too complex to fit into the myth of America the Inevitable and Ever Virtuous, whereas Lewis and Clark slide right into the national self-image.
Honoring Pike with a stamp or coin would bring up a lot
of history that many people would prefer to ignore; it is,
after all, much simpler to admire the Undaunted
Courage
of Lewis and Clark than to explore the tangled
intrigues of American politics two centuries ago.
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