Colorado Springs – Zebulon Pike quite literally put Colorado and much of the Southwest on the map, but in the popular imagination “he’s always been second fiddle to Lewis and Clark,” as historian Matt Mayberry puts it.
But next year, the explorer will get top honors as the Colorado Springs Pioneers Museum mounts a series of exhibitions to commemorate the 200th anniversary of Pike’s 1806 expedition and raise his profile as co-explorer of the Louisiana Purchase.
“You ask people here about Pike, and they know two things: that Pikes Peak was named after him, and that he didn’t climb the mountain,” says Mayberry, director of the downtown museum. “But there’s so much more to the story.”
Pike did ascend a peak, but it wasn’t the towering fourteener he had first spotted from 100 miles away on his trek up the Arkansas River. Rather, he appears to have struggled up Mount Rosa, an 11,500-foot summit several miles to the southeast, where he and three companions were stranded by a snowstorm and forced to bivouac in a cave.
“It’s lucky they survived,” says Roy Escott Pike, national president of the Pike Family Association (pikefamily.org), which functions as an unofficial guardian of Zebulon’s name. “When they started at the bottom, it was 52 degrees. But above the tree line, they got caught in deep snow, in summer uniforms, with no provisions. They ate nothing for two or three days.”
Another part of the story is that a few weeks after this harrowing ordeal, Pike and his full detachment traveled up through South Park – celebrating Christmas 1806 by feasting on eight freshly shot buffalo near present-day Salida – and later made their way into the San Luis Valley, only to be taken prisoner by Spaniards patrolling the upper reaches of the Rio Grande – which Pike had mistaken for the Red River.
Some historians theorize that Pike wasn’t lost but meant to be captured as a way of getting a firsthand look at provinces of New Spain that the fledgling U.S. republic needed to know about. In any case, he and his party were escorted south through Santa Fe and El Paso to Chihuahua, and eventually were taken back up the El Camino Real through present-day Texas to Natchitoches, La. – a journey Pike chronicled in his journals and maps, which were published in 1810, four years before Lewis and Clark’s.
“He was the first to lift the veil of secrecy that hung over New Spain,” notes John Patrick Michael Murphy, a retired attorney and amateur historian from Colorado Springs. “He also had a hand in bringing 10 states into the Union, and by promoting the settlement of Texas, he set in motion the forces that would lead to our war with Mexico.”
Pike, a sandy-haired Army captain who was just 27 when he came through Colorado, rose through the ranks to become a brigadier general before being mortally wounded at 34 at the Battle of York in what is now Toronto.
In conjunction with the bicentennial, relatives of Pike and his forbears are planning a reunion in Colorado Springs next July, the first such gathering since the 150th anniversary of Pike’s journey in 1956. More than 150 family members already have registered.
“Anyone who’s a Pike is invited. Our goal is to find out where they all hook back together,” says Roy Pike, 69, a retired minister from Oklahoma who defines his relationship to the explorer as “fourth cousin, four times removed.”
Pike notes that Zebulon’s only known son died in infancy, so his only direct heirs were descended from a daughter who went on to marry a son of President William Henry Harrison, “and we can’t find any one of them who want to be one of us.”
The Pikes of today who consider themselves relatives of Zebulon – such as Marshall Pike and his sister, Pamela Lee Pike Brady, who attended the 1956 reunion as children and visited Colorado Springs earlier this month to help plan the 2006 event – trace their lineage back several generations further, to a John Pike who arrived in this country from England in 1635, just 15 years after the Mayflower.
“I’ve always been very proud of my heritage,” says Brady, 59, of Valley Springs, Calif., near Sacramento. “When the subject came up in history class in school, I would say, ‘Oh, I’m related to Zebulon Pike.’ It was kind of always in the background, although I’ve never been much of a genealogist.”
As vice president of the Pike Family Association, Marshall Pike, 56, of Red Bluff, Calif., has custody of eight boxes of family-related papers, mostly letters and old genealogy forms, and hopes the reunion may help unearth more such material.
Meanwhile, Mayberry says, the museum is arranging to have the Zebulon Pike papers transferred to Colorado Springs from the National Archives in Washington, and is celebrating its recent acquisition of a walking cane engraved with the name “Pike” and donated by a family member from Las Cruces, N.M.
“It’s hard for us to say that Zebulon Pike held this in his hand,” he says, “but that’s what family tradition tells us.”
Staff writer Jack Cox can be reached at 303-820-1785 or jcox@denverpost.com.
Pike bicentennial
To commemorate Zebulon Pike’s 1806 expedition to the West, the Colorado Springs Pioneers Museum will offer a series of exhibits, public programs, school tours and other events, starting with a fundraiser, featuring a silent auction and “appearance” by the famed explorer himself, at 6 p.m. Saturday at the museum, 215 S. Tejon St.
The exhibits will include “Pike’s World: Exploration and Empire in the Greater Southwest,” opening Jan. 21; “Looming Large: The Artistic Legacy of Pikes Peak,” opening March 11; and “Marketing the Mountain: Pikes Peak in the Popular Imagination,” opening May 20.
For information, visit or call 719-385-5645.
