Wrobel, David

English

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Wrobel / The Fragile Edges of the New Western Empire          85
The Fragile Edges of the New Western Empire
A Review Essay on Citizen Explorer: The Life of Zebulon Pike
DaviD Wrobel
•
In the concluding pages of the fourth volume of The Winning of the West (1896), Theodore Roosevelt described Zebulon Montgomery Pike (1779–1813) as “an ardent patriot” whose loyalty to the “Union” was unques-
tionable, a skillful and “stout-hearted” hunter whose “indomitable will” and 
deep dedication to the men under his command during the 1805–1807 expedi-
tions to explore the Louisiana Purchase saved their lives, and a “pioneer in the 
exploration of the far West” on par with Meriwether Lewis and William Clark.1 
Reviewing the volume in the American Historical Review, Frederick Jack-
son Turner, like Roosevelt, treated “the explorations of Lewis and Clark and 
Pike” together, as an interconnected set of journeys, and chronicles, of west-
ern discovery. However, Turner’s review criticized Roosevelt for relying on 
ornithologist and frontier historian Elliott Coures’s editions of the Journals of 
Lewis and Clark (1893) and The Travels of Zebulon M. Pike (1895), and Henry 
Adams’s The History of the United States of America, 1801–1817 (9 vols., 1889–
1891), and for not utilizing available archival sources.2 Shortly after the review 
appeared, Roosevelt wrote to Turner in his own defense, and in the politest 
Jared Orsi, Citizen Explorer: The Life of Zebulon Pike (New York: Oxford University Press, 
2014. xii + 379 pp. 42 halftones, 12 maps, notes, bibliography, index. $29.95 cloth, isbn 978-0-
19-976872-1). David Wrobel is Merrick Chair in Western American History at the University 
of Oklahoma where he teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on the American West 
and American thought and culture. His most recent book is Global West, American Frontier: 
Travel, Empire, and Exceptionalism from Manifest Destiny to the Great Depression (Albuquer-
que: University of New Mexico Press, 2013). He is currently working on The West and Amer-
ica, 1900–2000: A Regional History.
86           New Mexico Historical Review / Volume 90, Number 1, Winter 2015
of tones explained that since he was a “more general writer” and “thoroughly 
good” studies of Lewis, Clark, and Pike were available, he “did not try to get 
any manuscript sources for th[ose] travels.”3
Readers of Jared Orsi’s superbly researched biography of Pike need have no 
such concerns about the use of available archival sources; the author has mined 
approximately sixty manuscript collections and consulted a wide range of addi-
tional published primary sources, as well as an impressive selection of pertinent 
secondary works, and demonstrates full command of those varied materials. 
Although Citizen Explorer reaches generally positive conclusions about Pike, 
it offers a considerably less triumphalist and more nuanced picture than Roos-
evelt’s work. Nonetheless, Orsi suggests, like Roosevelt, that we should remem-
ber Pike as readily as we do Lewis and Clark. Orsi’s book is certainly the most 
definitive treatment of Pike to date, and is likely to remain so for a long time 
to come. Moreover, the work makes important contributions to the fields of 
western American and environmental history, as well as to the history of the 
early American Republic. Indeed, Citizen Explorer is driven by the question of 
“how…Pike himself and the early republic more generally develop and sustain 
nationalism when their ideals bumped up against the physical challenges of the 
North American environment?” (p. 6).
In the 1890s, Turner and Roosevelt had both explicitly argued that the west-
ward-moving frontier was the leading edge of American nationalism, that 
Americanism was stronger on the western periphery, where the nation-building 
process was playing out, than on the East Coast, where the vast majority of the 
populace, and the government, were located. Orsi offers the careful reminder 
that the converse scenario was the more likely and logical one: as the nation’s 
advance guards, Lewis and Clark, and Pike, were sent out to and beyond the 
fringes of the nation’s new boundaries where they encountered indigenous cul-
tures, fur traders, and representatives of European nation-states who cared 
much about the cultivation of commerce, but had little regard for the emerging 
American state. Pike’s adventures unfolded in remote regions where the nation’s 
influence was thin and fragmentary at best, and the allegiance of citizens (even 
members of the actual expeditions) to the new American nation was tenuous. 
Yet in Pike’s enduring dedication to the United States, Orsi finds the embodi-
ment of the young nation’s resilience and ultimate success. Indeed, this is in the 
last analysis a story about how Pike, “an ardent nationalist,” consistently and 
doggedly sought to secure his personal independence through military service 
to his country (p. 14).
Orsi chronicles Pike’s life in seven finely crafted chapters. The first traces the 
Pike family’s quest for independence in North America from the mid-seventeenth 
century to 1794. The second examines Pike’s continued dedication to the nation 
Wrobel / The Fragile Edges of the New Western Empire          87
through military service from 1794 to 1805. The next four chapters—the heart of 
the narrative—are devoted to Pike’s two expeditions, from 1805 to 1807. The final 
chapter covers his continued military service from 1807 to 1813 and tragic death 
at the Battle of York. An epilogue ponders the dramatic changes in the West 
during the rest of the nineteenth century and attempts to place Pike—a figure of 
relative historical insignificance in the writings of the twentieth century—back 
at the center of the pantheon of important early western and national actors. 
“Pike endured physical hardship with fortitude in difficult environments in 
order to establish the nation in the West and defend its independence from rival 
peoples,” Orsi writes (p. 290).
In February 1806, while leading his first expeditionary party, charged with 
discovering the headwaters of the Mississippi, Pike and his men, weary and half 
frozen, wandered up to the British North West Company fur trading post at 
Leech Lake (near the westernmost tip of Lake Superior) where they were fed 
and sheltered and treated in thoroughly hospitable fashion by the fort’s com-
mander, Hugh McGillis. Ten days later Pike ordered his men to shoot down the 
fort’s British flag and raise the American one in its place. During his stay, Pike 
also wrote McGillis an official letter in which he accused him of evading U.S. 
customs and trading without proper licenses. McGillis responded by flattering 
Pike, thanking him for not enforcing a fine for the violations, assenting to fol-
low all of his directives, providing his party with dogs and a new sled, and then 
returning to business as usual as soon as Pike departed. In recounting this inci-
dent Orsi hits upon a central theme of the narrative: Pike’s persistent practice of 
“enforcing American sovereignty over hosts upon whom he was utterly depen-
dent” (p. 122).
Journeying across the Plains on his second major expedition, from July to 
November 1806, Pike and his men relied upon the hospitality of the Osages and 
then the Pawnees, while Pike sought unsuccessfully to incorporate both into the 
new American nation. His experiences once more illustrated both his deep ded-
ication to building the republic and that republic’s fragility at its western edges. 
Venturing into the Rockies, from November 1806 to February 1807, Pike orches-
trated what might be considered a comedy of errors if it had not been so awfully 
tragic. Orsi writes, “[t]hree times he crossed chains of mountains without need-
ing to do so. He left frostbitten men in the snow, contemplated suicide in the 
wilderness, threatened to execute a malingerer, and raised an American flag on 
Spanish soil” (p. 160–61). Pike’s actions on this leg of his explorations led to accu-
sations that he was acting on secret orders, colluding with Gen. James Wilkin-
son and Aaron Burr in treasonous activities. But Orsi, like Roosevelt long before, 
rejects such conclusions, insisting that “Pike’s actions during those months were 
. . . consistent with those of a man bumbling through the mountains” (p. 200).
88           New Mexico Historical Review / Volume 90, Number 1, Winter 2015
The last phase of Pike’s second expedition, from February to July 1807, was 
marked by his party’s capture by a Spanish force that escorted them to Santa Fe 
and back to Natchitoches, via El Paso, Chihuahua, and San Antonio. During 
his comfortable captivity, Pike managed to conceal enough of his diary entries 
and other papers to construct an account of the expedition. The resulting vol-
ume comprised Pike’s reconstructed journals from the expeditions, along with 
other documents that bolstered his reputation as a dedicated patriot and dis-
counted the Aaron Burr associations. As the account moved toward print and 
Pike disseminated key documents to the press, he received a series of military 
promotions, reaching the rank of lieutenant colonel by the time the book was 
published in 1810. The following year Pike referred to himself, in a letter to the 
U.S. attorney general, as a “Citizen Soldier” (p. 264). Then, during the War of 
1812, he received one more promotion, to the rank of brigadier general. Writ-
ing to his father prior to departing for battle, Pike noted that if he were to per-
ish, then he hoped for a death “like Wolfe’s—to sleep in the arms of victory” (p. 
268). Just before he died (after being struck in the head by debris from the fort’s 
explosion), Pike reportedly learned that the British flag had been taken down 
and “[t]he stars are going up” (p. 271). “In death,” Orsi concludes, “Pike reaped 
the honor and gratitude that had escaped him in life” (p. 272). Orsi has provided 
a powerful and perceptive account of a life worth remembering for its successes 
and failures, as well as its insights into early American expansionism.
Notes
1. Theodore Roosevelt, The Winning of the West, Vol. IV: Louisiana and the Northwest, 
1791–1807 (New York and London: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1896), 329, 337–38, 340.
2. Frederick Jackson Turner, review of The Winning of the West, Vol. IV, by Theodore 
Roosevelt, American Historical Review (October 1896): 171–76. Turner’s review copy of 
the book, with his published review pasted in the back, is in the Huntington Library Rare 
Book Collection, no.139455.
3. Theodore Roosevelt to Frederick Jackson Turner, 4 November 1896, in Theodore 
Roosevelt, Letters and Speeches (New York: Library of America, 2004), 91–92.


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