Colorado Springs – Approaching the summit of Mount Rosa, John Murphy stops to admire a bristlecone pine with a trunk as big around as a whiskey barrel.
“This is a Pike tree,” Murphy announces, inspecting the sentinel’s windblown limbs. “They say if you can’t get your arms around it, it could be 400 to 500 years old. So we know it was here when Pike passed this point.”
Zebulon Montgomery Pike, who embarked on his historic Southwest expedition 200 years ago this month, never made it to the top of the peak that bears his name. But he certainly tried – in a grueling, five-day quest that he had thought would be just a day hike – and people have puzzled ever since over which of several subsidiary summits he actually did reach.
Now Murphy, a 60-year-old retired trial lawyer and Pike buff since kindergarten, believes he has nailed down the answer. It’s Mount Rosa, a pyramid-shaped high point on the southeast shoulder of Pikes Peak, about 8 miles short of the true summit.
“I put all the ‘suspects’ in a lineup,” Murphy says, “and this is the only one that matched up with the points of evidence that you can check in Pike’s journals.”
Among other things, the rock-strewn summit of Mount Rosa offers an unobstructed view of what Pike called “Grand Peak,” and it is a 10-hour trek from Pike’s base camp near the foot of Cheyenne Mountain – a point that Murphy verified by sending two young volunteers on a test climb in November, the same time that Pike made his ascent. Most important, it boasts a cave about an hour from the top, where Pike and three compatriots – in a mere hint of what was to come – shivered through a night in subfreezing weather without food, water or blankets.
“Technically, this is a rock shelter. But it’s big enough for four guys,” Murphy says. The cave now is marked by a sign he erected with help from a hiking club called the Saturday Knights.
From the 11,499-foot crest of Mount Rosa, the panorama extends from the Palmer Divide to the Sangre de Cristos, which Pike crossed some two months after the aborted attempt on the big mountain.
Ironically, the explorer could see hardly any of this when he decided to turn back. According to his journals, clouds covered all of the flatlands, and a snowstorm moved in and obscured the 14,115-foot summit of Pikes Peak.
But Pike’s trek up Mount Rosa shouldn’t be dismissed as a failure, says Murphy, who has amassed a bookcase full of material on the explorer and his exploits.
“This was the first recorded climb of a mountain west of the Mississippi, and the first ascent into the alpine zone,” he says. “That makes Pike the grandfather of Western American mountaineering.”
“Driven by ambition”
As a 27-year-old Army lieutenant, Pike was sent west in 1806 to establish contact with Plains Indian tribes and explore the southwestern part of the Louisiana Purchase – territory that had been under Spanish control for nearly 40 years until it was ceded back to France just before its acquisition by the United States.
But as a man who was “driven by ambition to do something notable,” as Pike scholar Stuart Wier of Boulder puts it, he went well beyond his orders.
Pike was supposed to go up the Arkansas River and return via the Red River, which was incorrectly assumed to emanate from the same general area. Instead, he made his way as far west as Colorado’s San Luis Valley, intending to check out the Rio Grande, which then was in Spanish hands.
Some say Pike was a spy, looking to get captured so he could bring back information about the interior provinces of New Spain – a land that had been little-visited by outsiders.
Others say he was simply lost, as he indicated when his party was detained by Spanish troops south of Alamosa and he famously told them, “What? Is not this the Red River?”
“What did Pike know, and when did he know it?” ponders John Hutchins, a Pike buff from Denver who also is a lawyer. “There’s lots of evidence, but the best of it may have been lost (in a house fire that destroyed most of Pike’s letters), or it is still to be discovered in some mildewy, misfiled letter in Castro’s Cuba.”
Whatever Pike’s aims, his journey put Colorado and several other states on the map of North America, opened the door to a century of commerce on the Santa Fe Trail, and introduced the concept of the “Great American Desert,” as Pike described much of the region.
“Saying this year is the 200th anniversary of the finding of Pikes Peak is like saying the Lewis and Clark bicentennial was the 200th anniversary of finding Great Falls, Mont. The story is much bigger,” says Margo Hatton-Wolf of the Historic Arkansas Riverfront Park Foundation in Pueblo.
“People don’t have any idea that he was all over this area, from Granada to Pueblo, up to Salida and down through the San Luis Valley,” she says. “The mountain has so overshadowed the man that few people realize he was really an interesting figure. ”
Fog of history
From the looks of things today, it appears his story could use amplification.
In Lamar, for example, where laborers in the Depression built a three-story “Pike Tower” on the site of one of Pike’s campsites, his role as the original trailblazer seems dimly recognized even by long-time residents.
When did he come through? “Way before my time,” chuckles Arkansas Valley native Loretta Kerr of Rocky Ford, acknowledging that it’s been decades since she learned about Pike as a schoolgirl.
“We’re probably more aware that the Santa Fe Trail came through here,” says Elma Osbment, who grew up in neighboring Baca County and has lived in Lamar since the early 1960s. “You see things that remind you, like the Santa Fe Trail highway signs, and the Santa Fe Trail Days in Las Animas.”
The primary modern reminder of Pike, of course, is the mountain, which he first discerned as a “small blue cloud” from a vantage point east of Las Animas, some 120 miles away – a grassy rise now marked with a plaque mounted on a 5-ton chunk of Pikes Peak pink granite, hauled to the site earlier this year.
Colorado State University professor Jared Orsi, who is writing a book about Pike’s expedition and its role in the expansion of the young American republic, suspects that if the mountain hadn’t “cemented his legacy,” Pike might not be remembered today.
But that’s beside the point, argues Zebulon Montgomery “Monty” Pike, an 84-year-old Salida resident who traces his lineage back several generations to the explorer’s brother.
In Monty’s view, Pike should be remembered less for his Western explorations than for his heroic role in the defeat of the British in what is now Toronto during the War of 1812 – a battle that ended Pike’s life at the age of 34, when he was mortally wounded by debris from an exploding powder magazine.
“He organized the first amphibious landing in U.S. history,” Monty says of his namesake, who had been promoted to brigadier general by that time. “He took 1,500 to 2,000 troops from Sacketts Harbor, N.Y., across Lake Ontario and finally captured York. People there have made a determination that he shortened the war by about a year.”
Hero status faded
For the first few decades after his death, Pike was regarded as a national hero. Taverns, steamboats and a slew of new towns and counties were named after him, from Pikeville, Tenn., to Zebulon, Ga.
But as settlers began moving farther west in the 1840s and ’50s, his name became more associated with the peak, and his image as a military hero was overshadowed in the 1860s by the many heroes bequeathed by the Civil War. By the 20th century, says Michael Olson, an author and history professor at Pikes Peak Community College in Colorado Springs, “he was remembered almost exclusively for his role in the opening of the West.”
Pike’s journey into the Central Rockies, launched from a fort near St. Louis on July 15, 1806, wasn’t his first venture into the frontier. A year earlier, he had been sent in search of the source of the Mississippi.
That wintertime expedition into what is now northern Minnesota apparently created a bond between Pike and his enlisted men, whom he depicted in his journals as “a damn’d set of rascels.” All but two “re- upped” for the trip to the Southwest – which turned out to be a wilderness survival saga.
“Reading the journals gives you the feeling in your gut that things are not going to go well,” says historian Matt Mayberry, who has organized a series of bicentennial exhibitions at the Pioneers Museum in Colorado Springs.
Halfway through Kansas, when six of Pike’s men split off with a younger officer to explore the lower part of the Arkansas, their canoes ran aground in shallow water before they had gone 100 yards.
In Colorado, on the day Pike first sighted Pikes Peak, his men killed 17 buffalo and packed out 900 pounds of meat. But his horses couldn’t get enough forage on the arid plains, and one died the next day.
As the late Donald Jackson put it in the introduction to his definitive edition of Pike’s journals in 1966, “Nothing that Zebulon Montgomery Pike ever tried to do was easy, and most of his luck was bad.”
After what Mayberry terms “the lost weekend” on the southeastern flanks of Pikes Peak, the explorer might have decided to stay put with his men at the site of present-day Pueblo and hole up for the winter, as Lewis and Clark did when besieged on the Upper Missouri.
But he chose to push on into the mountains, eventually crossing the Sangre de Cristos on foot in the dead of winter – a trek so torturous it’s astonishing he and his men survived.
“Pike was a damned fool not to come in the summer,” jokes Dr. Bruce Paton of Denver, a wilderness-medicine expert who has studied the survival aspects of the expedition in detail.
In all seriousness, he says, “I think we have to consider the possibility that some of the bad decisions Pike made were due to hypothermia and starvation” – conditions that can make even the sturdiest outdoorsman irrational and prone to misjudgment.
Paton cites one incident in particular that suggests this – an encounter in which Pike threatened to execute a soldier who complained that “it was more than human nature could bear, to march three days without sustenance, through snows three feet deep, and carry burthens only fit for horses.”
But the 70-pound loads, harsh conditions and precarious food supply weren’t the only factors that might have doomed Pike’s party. By modern mountaineering standards, Paton says, the expedition was deficient in several respects:
The size of the group, 16 by the time Pike came through Colorado, was too small for such an extended expedition.
The men’s clothing was “totally inadequate.” The troops had been outfitted only in summer-weight cotton fatigues, which had become so ragged by the time they hit the mountains that they were fashioning garments out of buffalo hide and cut-up blankets.
Their shelter, provided largely by tents or rocky overhangs, was usually poor, and far inferior to the lodges used by Lewis and Clark.
The planning was hastily done, with preparations based on the ill-considered prospect of a return before winter.
The objectives were mixed, something that is “always dangerous” on any expedition.
The party’s knowledge of the territory was sketchy, based partly on a map compiled largely from hearsay by a cartographer who had never been here.
“The question is not how did they survive, but why,” Paton says. “Incredible endurance, incredible determination, a strong will to live, and I think, contrary to what Donald Jackson said, quite a lot of luck.”
Geographic surprises
“It’s very hard for somebody today to recapture the sense of the unknown that Pike must have felt,” says Orsi, the CSU historian. “The best geographers of the time, informed by the European idea of ‘continental symmetry,’ held that the Rocky Mountains were about the size of the Appalachians. So when he saw Pikes Peak from over 100 miles away, he had no idea it was 14,000 feet high. Every day, he was saying in his journal that they’d be there the next day, but it took them a week. ”
Nor, apparently, could Pike fathom that the Red River – much larger than the Arkansas when it empties into the Mississippi – might arise as far south and east as it does, in what is now the Texas Panhandle.
When he arrived at the Great Sand Dunes, he climbed 600 feet to the top of the highest dune and pulled out his spyglass. Halfway across the vast flat valley before him, near the site of present-day Alamosa, he could see a line of cottonwood trees indicating a river. Was it the Red, or the Rio Grande?
A contingent of 100 Spanish dragoons and militiamen cleared up that question a few weeks later when they accosted, or rescued, Pike and his men at a stockade they had built on the north bank of the Conejos River east of present- day La Jara.
When informed that he was in effect trespassing, Pike struck his 15-star flag, accepted an escort to Santa Fe and was eventually taken to the provincial capital of Chihuahua before finally being returned to American hands in Natchitoches, La., some four months later.
While none of his men died of exposure to the elements (although one was killed in a shooting in Santa Fe), Pike can be faulted as a military leader for failing to protect their welfare, says John Sweet, a Colorado National Guard officer who has written widely about frontier history.
“He was not a figure of mythic greatness – he was too human and too flawed for that,” says Sweet. “But he was courageous and honorable, and he had the drive and determination, the commitment and sense of duty, to get missions accomplished.”
Pike’s Path
After abandoning his effort to climb Pikes Peak, the explorer rejoined the men he had left camped at present-day Pueblo and pressed on up the Arkansas, leading his bedraggled party through 10-below temperatures and knee-deep snowpast Canon City and into South Park – no easy place to be in the winter, even today.
From there, he went west over Trout Creek Pass, traveled upriver as far as present-day Twin Lakes, then headed south again past the line of 14ers now called the Collegiate Peaks, thinking he at last had found the Red River.
On the day before Christmas, nearly starving after several days of marginal hunting, Pike and his men managed to kill eightbuffalo and feasted merrilybefore heading downstream again – an event now commemorated by a sign on U.S. 285 north of Poncha Springs.
Several days later, after following the Arkansas through, over and around the Royal Gorge, with his men again famished and his horses banged up from crisscrossing the river onice, Pike was mortified – on his 28th birthday – to find himself back at the site of Canon City. He hadmerely gone in a huge circle.
But a second time, instead of digging in and waiting out the winter, Pike pushed on into even more extreme conditions. Leaving his two weakest men with the horses, he headed southwest into the snow-covered Wet Mountain Valley, where several of his troops – all traveling on foot by now – suffered frostbitten feet in a river crossing south of present-day Westcliffe.
By late January 1807, having left two more men behind with frozen feet, Pike and his dwindling party were still struggling westward, toward a midwinter crossing of the Sangre de Cristo range – an endeavor that even today is no laughing matter.
As is the case with the first mountain Pike climbed, there long have been questions about which route he took to get into the San Luis Valley – over Medano Pass, at roughly 10,000 feet, or Mosca Pass, several miles farther south at 9,700 feet.
The consensus today is that Pike came over Medano Pass, but no hard evidence exists and “this was a time when nothing was named,” notes Fred Bunch, a resource management specialist at Great Sands Dunes National Park and Preserve, which sits at the western foot of the Sangres.
Jack Cooper of Monte Vista, a retired dentist and co-founder of the San Luis Valley Historical Society, is firmly in the Medano camp.
“I went over that trail 15 years straight at the same time of year in the 1970s and ’80s, using Pike’s landmarks, his descriptions and his timing, and it just all fits,” says Cooper, whose new book on “Pike’s Great Western Adventure” is due out in July.
In the Mosca Pass corner is Joe Carter, a longtime Adams State College professor who also researched the subject on an annual series of “Pike hikes” over the Sangres, and published a book on “Pike in Colorado” in 1978.
“He tried Medano, but the snow was too deep, so he went over Mosca,” Carter asserts. “Anybody in the valley will tell you that Mosca generally blows out in the winter. It’s much easier to go over.”
Whichever route Pike took, says Bunch, “the significant thing is that he crossed over the mountains and encountered the sand dunes, which he described in his journal as like ‘the sea in a storm.”‘
Pike’s Promise
If his career hadn’t been cut short by his death in the Battle of York, could Zebulon Pike have gone on to leave an even larger imprint on the national experience?
Yes, says Michael Olson, a historian at Pikes Peak Community College: “We got a President Jackson out of the War of 1812. We very easily could have gotten a President Pike.”
Adds Don Headlee, an interpretive ranger with the Corps of Engineers at John Martin Reservoir, where Pike first glimpsed the peak: “In my estimation, if he hadn’t been killed, he’d have been going places – he’d have been a great man.”
But Jared Orsi, a historian at Colorado State University, isn’t convinced. “He certainly aspired to national prominence. A career as a territorial governor or in Congress would have been very much within his range,” he says. “But I’m not sure he had the polish and the political talent to be President.”
As Jim Diers, former director of the Southwest studies program at Colorado College, puts it, “He’s probably less of a hero than legend has depicted him, but greater than the debunkers make him out to be.”
MORE: For bicentennial events commerating Zebulon Pike’s expedition, see Colorado Sunday. The official bicentennial website is
Staff writer Jack Cox can be reached at 303-820-1785 or jcox@denverpost.com.
