Zebulon Pike

Zebulon Montgomery Pike was a 26-year-old Army lieutenant when General James Wilkinson — commanding general of the U.S. Army and, as later evidence proved, a paid Spanish agent — ordered him to lead a small expedition up the Mississippi River in 1805 to find its source. Pike got as far as Leech Lake in present-day Minnesota and declared it the headwaters, which was wrong (it is Lake Itasca, a few miles west), but he negotiated land cessions with the Dakota that became Fort Snelling and produced the first systematic American description of the upper Mississippi country. Wilkinson, satisfied, sent him out again the following year.

The 1806–1807 expedition was the larger and stranger one. Pike was ordered into the southern reaches of the Louisiana Purchase to "scout" the headwaters of the Arkansas and Red rivers — territory still hotly disputed with Spanish Mexico. In November 1806 he sighted from the prairie a mountain he could not climb in waist-deep snow, called it "Grand Peak," and pushed south. The Spanish arrested Pike and his men in present-day Colorado in February 1807 for trespassing, took his papers, escorted him through Santa Fe and Chihuahua, and released him at the Louisiana border in July. He arrived back in the United States with detailed observations of Spanish military and economic vulnerability that informed every later American push into the Southwest.

Pike was promoted to brigadier general during the War of 1812 and was killed on April 27, 1813, leading an American assault on York (modern Toronto). A Canadian magazine exploded behind British lines as he was reading the surrender, sending stone shrapnel a quarter-mile that struck him in the back. He was 34. The "Grand Peak" he had seen and not climbed was renamed Pikes Peak in 1859 during the Pike's Peak Gold Rush, became the inspiration for Katharine Lee Bates's "America the Beautiful" in 1893, and is now climbed by 750,000 tourists a year on a paved road and a cog railway — a recognition the original Pike never received.