Thus, if we begin to study too closely into the early history of the trans-Missouri, we begin to lose all respect for its mysteries, and come to think of it as a country that was never new, but was always well known. Indeed, there is much warrant for this. Witness again the journeys of that straightforward character, Lieutenant Pike, the first American officer to reach the headwaters of the Mississippi River, and to arrange for the proper respect for the American flag in that far-off country. After Pike had returned down the Mississippi River and had been ordered to explore the country near the Rockies, around the headwaters of the Red River, he began to cross the trails of some of these earlier adventurers of whom we have been speaking. Thus, in 1806, while Pike is making his way across the plains, he hears of Lewis and Clark’s descent of the Missouri. On August nineteenth, 1806, he states that he finds the “place where Mr. Chouteau formerly had his fort.” Chouteau was one of these same early fur traders, as we shall find if we care to go into the minutiæ of history. Lieutenant Pike describes this fort as “already overgrown with vegetation;” so it could not have been new in 1806. From this point Lieutenant Pike goes to “Manuel Liza’s fort,” which then marked another advance post of the trans-Missouri travel. Next he heads westward, touches the Grand and White rivers and reaches the Solomon Fork. Here he meets the Pawnees, discovers that they are wearing Spanish medals, learns that the Spaniards have sent an expedition into that country from the New Mexican settlements, and finds a “very large road” over which the Spaniards have returned to the westward. Thus it seems that not even good Zebulon was to have a West all his own. Forsooth, Lieutenant Pike might have gone back more than two hundred years, and have bethought himself of the old Spaniard Coronado, who in the year 1540 journeyed from Mexico across the plains until he stood on the banks of the Missouri River, from which Pike himself started forth. And strange enough, if we seek for coincidences, is the fact that Coronado himself recounts that he met on the Missouri River, that is to say, on the stream that is now called the Missouri, an Indian who wore a silver medal that was evidently the work of a white man. There is something singular for you, if you seek a strange incident! Where did Coronado’s Indian get his medal? This was closer to the first of things. It must have come from the settlements of the whites on the lower Atlantic slope. But by what process of travel? Are we indeed to have any mysteries in the West, and shall we ever be able to set any date in our scheme of transportation properly to be called initial?