Whang! It Buried Itself Almost Out of Sight Behind the Elk Chief’s Ribs 97 But Stub Never Felt the Final Crash 203 “In My Proper Character, Sir: An Officer of the United States Army” 298 MAP The Trail of Lieutenant Pike 19 [Illustration: LIEUTENANT ZEBULON MONTGOMERY PIKE From the First Edition of His “Expeditions” Philadelphia, 1810] BRIGADIER-GENERAL ZEBULON MONTGOMERY PIKE A noble young American soldier and explorer, whose guiding purpose was: Honor, Country, Duty. Born January 5, 1779, at Lamberton, near Trenton, New Jersey. His father was Captain Zebulon Pike, of the Fourth Continental Dragoons, in the War of the Revolution; later major in the Third and the First Regiments of Infantry, U. S. A., and brevet lieutenant-colonel. The boy Zebulon was brought up as a soldier. At fifteen he was a cadet in his father’s infantry regiment of the United States Third Sub-Legion. At twenty, or in March, 1799, he was commissioned second lieutenant in the Second Regiment of Infantry, U. S. A. Commissioned first lieutenant, November, the same year. Transferred to the First Infantry, of which his father was major, in April, 1802. In this regiment Meriwether Lewis, of the famous Lewis and Clark expedition to the mouth of the Columbia River, was then a captain. At the age of twenty-six, while Captains Lewis and Clark are exploring through the far northwest of the new Louisiana Territory purchase, he receives orders, July 30, 1805, from General James Wilkinson, Chief of the Army, to ascend the Mississippi River from St. Louis to its source. He is to report upon the country, the Indians and the fur trade of this, the eastern border of Upper Louisiana. Starts from St. Louis, August 9, 1805, with twenty enlisted men of the regular army, in a keel-boat seventy feet long, provisioned for four months. Suffers many hardships by storm, cold and hunger, but returns successful on the last day of April, 1806, after an absence of almost nine months. In less than two months, or on June 24, 1806, he is directed to ascend the Missouri and Osage Rivers, and restore forty-six Osage Indians, rescued by the Government from the Potawatomi Indians, to their people of the Osage towns in western Missouri. He is to make peace, by order of their American father, between the Osage and the Kansas nations. He is then to continue to the Pawnees of present northern Kansas, and ask them to help him on to make peace with the Comanches in the southwest on the borders of New Mexico. While with the Comanches he is to explore the head-waters of the Arkansas and Red (Canadian) Rivers, but he must avoid trespassing upon the Spanish territory of New Mexico. Spanish territory is supposed to extend south from the Red River, although the Spanish claim that it extends much farther north, even through Kansas.