In life and in death, fame and glory eluded Zebulon Montgomery Pike (1779–1813). The ambitious young military officer and explorer, best known for a mountain peak that he neither scaled nor named, was destined to live in the shadows of more famous contemporaries—explorers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark. This collection of thought-provoking essays rescues Pike from his undeserved obscurity. It does so by providing a nuanced assessment of Pike and his actions within the larger context of American imperial ambition in the time of Jefferson. Pike’s accomplishments as an explorer and mapmaker and as a soldier during the War of 1812 has been tainted by his alleged connection to Aaron Burr’s conspiracy to separate the trans-Appalachian region from the United States. For two hundred years historians have debated whether Pike was an explorer or a spy, whether he knew about the Burr Conspiracy or was just a loyal foot soldier. This book moves beyond that controversy to offer new scholarly perspectives on Pike’s career. The essayists—all prominent historians of the American West—examine Pike’s expeditions and writings, which provided an image of the Southwest that would shape American culture for decades. John Logan Allen explores Pike’s contributions to science and cartography; James P. Ronda and Leo E. Oliva address his relationships with Native peoples and Spanish officials; Jay H. Buckley chronicles Pike’s life and compares Pike to other Jeffersonian explorers; Jared Orsi discusses the impact of his expeditions on the environment; and William E. Foley examines his role in Burr’s conspiracy. Together the essays assess Pike’s accomplishments and shortcomings as an explorer, soldier, empire builder, and family man. Pike’s 1810 journals and maps gave Americans an important glimpse of the headwaters of the Mississippi and the southwestern borderlands, and his account of the opportunities for trade between the Mississippi Valley and New Mexico offered a blueprint for the Santa Fe Trail. This volume is the first in more than a generation to offer new scholarly perspectives on the career of an overlooked figure in the opening of the American West.

This valuable and long-out-of-print edition of Pike's Southwestern journals is being reissued on the bicentennial of the journey with a new Introduction by historian Mark L. Gardner.

A historian offers the biography of the soldier and explorer for whom Pike's Peak is named, describing his amazing expeditions through areas that would become modern-day Mississippi, Minnesota and Arkansas before being captured by the Spanish.

Bernardo de Miera y Pacheco (1713–1785) is remembered today not only as colonial New Mexico’s preeminent religious artist, but also as the cartographer who drew some of the most important early maps of the American West. His “Plano Geographico” of the Colorado Plateau and Great Basin, revised by his hand in 1778, influenced other mapmakers for almost a century. This book places the man and the map in historical context, reminding readers of the enduring significance of Miera y Pacheco. Later Spanish cartographers, as well as Baron Alexander von Humboldt, Captain Zebulon Montgomery Pike, and Henry Schenck Tanner, projected or expanded upon the Santa Fe cartographer’s imagery. By so doing, they perpetuated Miera y Pacheco’s most notable hydrographic misinterpretations. Not until almost seventy years after Miera did John Charles Frémont take the field and see for himself whither the waters ran and whither they didn’t.