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This is the bicentennial of the first Christmas observation known to Colorado history. On Dec. 24, 1806, Capt. Zebulon Montgomery Pike and 15 men camped a few miles north of Salida. They stayed through the next day, enjoying a feast of eight bison. The event will be honored here today with a buffalo barbecue where Pike camped 200 years ago along the Arkansas River.
The commemoration will be basically a local event, as is
typical of the entire Pike bicentennial -- events here and
there, but no national celebration like that of the Lewis
and Clark Corps of Discovery.
Yet the Pike expedition might be more instructive. Or at least, my recent re-reading of his journal has been educational.
For instance, Pike thought he was on the Red River on that Christmas long ago. His orders had been to ascend the Arkansas and descend the Red, so that the United States could determine the boundary of the Louisiana Purchase, defined by the Mississippi River and all its western tributaries.
The Red River in question is the squiggly line between Texas and Oklahoma, and it begins in the panhandle of Texas. But Pike and his superiors believed it had to start in the Rocky Mountains.
That's because they were rationalists who believed in an
abstract logic. President Thomas Jefferson, for instance,
was sure that North America had a symmetry. In the east,
you could ascend the Potomac to the divide in the
Appalachian Mountains, make a short portage, and descend
the Ohio. So in the west, you should be able to ascend the
Missouri to the divide in the Rocky Mountains, make a short
portage, and descend the Columbia. This belief that there
must be a short portage
caused no end of grief for
Lewis and Clark.
Similarly, the logic of the era said rivers had to start in mountain ranges, and after Pike decided that the Arkansas began as a trickle in the Royal Gorge, the next south-flowing river in the mountains just had to be the Red. Thus he debilitated his men and horses as they wandered in the mountains, only to return on Jan. 5, 1807, to the campsite he had left on Dec. 10, 1806 at Cañon City.
The lesson: What's actually on the ground may not be reflect abstract theories about how things are supposed to work.
Another lesson from Pike's journal: They were tougher then. Imagine walking more or less barefoot with a 70-pound pack through three feet of snow in 10-degree weather. And marching for two weeks, sometimes for several days without food, as they did on the trek up Grape Creek from Cañon City through the Wet Mountain Valley to the San Luis Valley in January of 1807.
When Private John Brown complained that this was more
than human nature could bear,
Pike promised to shoot
him if Brown ever again uttered language that was
seditious and mutinous
that tended to sow discontent
among the party.
Pike was captured by the Spanish in February, 1807, and taken to Santa Fe, then Chihuahua, before being returned to American soil at Natchitoches, La., on July 1, 1807. He made observations of Mexico, among them this:
Should an army of Americans ever march into the
country ... they will only have to march from province to
province in triumph, and be hailed by the united voices of
grateful millions as their deliverers and saviors, whilst
our national character resounds to the most distant nations
of earth.
It didn't exactly work that way in the Mexican War of 1846-48, and it hasn't worked that way in Iraq since 2003. So there's another lesson from reading Pike -- a lesson that has yet to stick, alas.
But Merry Christmas anyway.
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