Note 161 — Evans’s Pedestrious Tour of Four Thousand Miles—1818 (continued 4)

Brigadier-general Zebulon Montgomery Pike, born in New Jersey in 1779, was a lieutenant in the United States army, when, in 1805, he was given command of an expedition to trace the Mississippi River to its source. Having made this journey and obtained land from the Indians for a fort at the Falls of St. Anthony, he was sent the following year to explore the Arkansas and Red rivers. Ascending the Arkansas to the mountains, and discovering Pike’s Peak, but unable to find the source of the Red, he came upon the Rio Grande, and there was taken prisoner by the Spanish, and sent to Santa Fé. While in command of an expedition against York (Toronto), Canada, in 1813, he was accidentally killed by the explosion of a magazine.—Ed.