Zebulon Pike and the Conquest of the Southwestern United States

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Zebulon Pike and the Conquest of the Southwestern United States

Overview

In late October 1806, Zebulon Montgomery Pike (1779-1813) led an expedition that professed its main goal as mapping the Arkansas and Red Rivers. In reality Pike's explorations may have been designed to gauge the military strength of a potential enemy, Spain, and possibly even provoke an international incident which would lead to war. Nonetheless his journey, although fraught with error and controversy, proved to be influential on the development and conquest of the region and had an impact on settlement patterns throughout the western United States in the eighteenth century.

Background

The United States in 1806 was a growing country. Just three years previous in 1803 the country had secured the Louisiana Purchase, one of the largest land deals in western history, from France. That same year President Thomas Jefferson sent Meriwether Lewis (1774-1809) and William Clark (1770-1838) to make a survey of the newly acquired land. Before this time, most of what is currently the western United States belonged to Spain. After Spain ceded large parts of the territory to Napoleon, the French leader wasted little time in selling the land to the United States to raise money to finance his campaigns in Europe.

The rest of what is now the southwestern United States remained in Spanish hands. This includes present-day Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, Nevada, Colorado, and California. The Spanish prohibited American traders from operating in the areas under their control, as they were extremely wary of the United States Government's designs on the region. Even after the large acquisition of the Louisiana Purchase territories, many in the United States government coveted the rest of the Spanish lands. Not the least of these was the United States Army's ranking officer at the time, and Governor of Upper Louisiana, General James Wilkinson.

Pike may have been the commander of the 1806-1807 expedition, but General Wilkinson was the mastermind. Wilkinson was a complex character at best and a traitor at worst. Wilkinson had been in the pay of the Spanish government for years, referred to as Number 13 in Spanish diplomatic correspondence, not for political or ideological reasons, but simply as a means to supplement his lifestyle. At one time he received $12,000 by supplying fake invasion plans of the southwest to the Spanish. Pike's expedition probably was a key element in one of Wilkinson's biggest plots.

One of Wilkinson's partners in this scheme was then Vice President of the United States Aaron Burr. Burr and Wilkinson hoped, using Pike as a willing or unwilling dupe, to instigate a war with Spain. Then he and Burr would lead an army of their own against the Spanish with the goal of securing a piece of the area for a private empire.

It is not conclusively known if Pike was aware of Wilkinson and Burr's scheme before he began his expedition. Pike was an ambitious man and he felt that a peacetime army left him little room for advancement and fame. Upon seeing the accolades given to Lewis and Clark upon their return from their great explorations, Pike was able to secure a position as the leader of an expedition to locate the source of the Mississippi River. He failed, in that he missed the true headwaters by 25 miles (40 km), but returned to St. Louis in the spring of 1806 and by the fall had left on his trip to map the Arkansas and Red Rivers.

Yet Pike admitted to Wilkinson that he had a plan for reconnoitering Spanish territory and reaching Sante Fe. He would move into Spanish-controlled lands and when confronted by Spanish authorities claim to be lost and then offer to visit the government in Sante Fe to offer explanations and apologize.

Pike could not have been considered the most experienced or the best man for the job at hand. The journal of his expedition was confiscated by the Spanish, and the notes he was able to hide from them are described as "patchy." Many of the facts he reported were reviewed as "for the greater part very inaccurate," and he is reputed to have stolen and copied the map he made of the area from a German mapmaker named Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859).

In addition, Pike and his men suffered through an ill-advised and poorly planned winter crossing of the Rocky Mountains. Besides this they really did get lost several times. At one point Pike realized that they had been traveling in a circle for over a month. After venturing into Spanish territory, he and his party were arrested just as he had "planned" at the trip's outset. The Spanish confiscated nearly all of Pike's journals and notes written until that time, and what reports Pike was able to bring out after that had to be smuggled. Taken to see Spanish officials in Sante Fe, and eventually deep into present-day Mexico, Pike returned nine months after he left, on what he had foreseen as a four-month's travel, to a nationwide scandal.

Burr and Wilkinson's scandal broke and the results of this severely tainted Pike's expedition. It turned out that Wilkinson had no authority to even order such a mission and Burr was brought to trial over the plot. Burr was eventually acquitted. Pike, for his part, refused to say anything bad about Wilkinson and even wrote passionate pleas in the General's defense. Wilkinson was able to save his own career by trying to pin everything on Burr and in the end it is Pike, and what positive work his expedition accomplished, that suffered the most as the result of Wilkinson's machinations.

Pike died, in the Battle of York, (now Toronto) Canada, during the war of 1812.

Impact

Pike's expedition directly led to the conquest and settlement of the Spanish, and later Mexican, lands of the Southwest by the United States. By 1846 war did finally come to the area but it was not between the United States and Spain, as Mexico had won independence from the Spanish in 1821. This was the war Wilkinson, Burr, and possibly Pike had wished to start in 1806. The end result was a treaty in which the United States was "sold" New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, Nevada, Colorado, and California. In addition Texas seceded from Mexico and joined the United States.

This annexation of the lands, of which Pike was the first American to explore, served to ultimately drive any European influence from what is now the continental United States. If Spain and/or Mexico had kept possession of this region, the balance of power in the western hemisphere would have evolved down a much different path.

While it is highly likely that this "purchase" of the Southwest would have occurred even if Pike had never set foot on his travels through the area, his journey also served to publicize this part of the country and brought it to the fore-front of the national scene. Later expeditions, notably those of Stephen Harriman Long in 1820, built on the groundwork, however shaky, laid down by Pike and brought a more accurate and scientific study of the area.

Pike's journals and descriptions of the area made note of the abundant wildlife. As soon as it was realized that fur and valuable minerals existed in the area in great abundance, the fur trade thrived, and trappers and fortune seekers moved into the region, hastening the time when more and more permanent settlements would rise up. This was just one of the many reasons that lead to the large-scale displacement, exploitation, and oppression of the Native American population in the area.

Pike's expedition also had great influence on settlement patterns in the United States throughout the 1800s. The idea of the American Great Plains as the "Great American Desert" may seem like a fallacy today but in Pike's time, a place so empty of timber must have seemed practically inhospitable to someone raised in the then heavily forested eastern United States. This image of the Great Plains as desert persisted throughout nearly all of the 1800s. As a result initial western settlers concentrated on finding a route through the Rocky Mountains to California and the Northwest, leaving most of this area uninhabited until late in the homestead movement.

Pike described the city of Sante Fe as vitally important as a trade center in the area and that it had tremendous potential. He noted that it was lightly defended, and his descriptions of the city were to lead others in the future to seek their fortune by trading in the region. William Becknell (1796?-1865) pioneered a route to Sante Fe from Pike's starting point in Saint Louis, which later became the famous Sante Fe Trail.

Later, Missouri Senator Thomas Hart Benton proposed that a federal road be constructed along this route. The Sante Fe road was finished in 1827. By 1831 traffic on the road was heavy, and there are estimates that over 130 wagon trains a year traveled the road from St. Louis to Sante Fe. Benton went on to become one of the main proponents of the Manifest Destiny movement by the 1840s. This movement culminated with the passing of the Homestead Act, which became law in 1863. With free land in the West available for anyone with the will to take it, it wasn't long before the West was teeming with settlements.

While not all of the results of the expedition of Zebulon Pike were positive, and the motives for his journey controversial, the impact of this venture in the history and development of the southwestern and western United States cannot be ignored.

JOHN B. SEALS