II. In July, 1806, Pike left St. Louis on his second expedition. He ascended the Missouri to the Osage, and the latter to the villages of the Indians of that name. Thence he continued westward overland, entered Kansas, and proceeded to the Pawnee village on the Republican river, near the present Kansas-Nebraska line. Turning southward, he reached the Arkansaw river at the present site of Great Bend. There he dispatched his junior officer, Lieutenant Wilkinson, with a few men, to descend the Arkansaw, while with the rest of his company he ascended the same river into Colorado, as far as Pueblo. From this point he made an unsuccessful side-trip which had for its object the ascent of the since famous peak which bears his name, and returned to his camp at Pueblo. Thence pushing up the Arkansaw, he was halted by the Grand cañon, at the site of present Cañon City. He then made a detour to the right, which took him up Oil creek into South Park. He traversed this park, along the South Platte and some of its tributaries, left it by way of Trout Creek pass, and was thus again brought to the Arkansaw. He pushed up this river till he viewed its sources, in the vicinity of present Leadville, turned about, and with great difficulty descended it to the very camp he had left at Cañon City. This part of his journey was not accomplished without much hardship, and ended in chagrin; for he had fancied himself on the headwaters of that Red river whose sources he had been pointedly instructed to discover. Nothing was known at that time, to Americans, of the origin of that great branch of the Mississippi which was called Red river lower down; nor was it known till years afterward that what the Spaniards had called high up by a name equivalent to Red river was really that main fork of the Arkansaw which is now designated the Canadian river, whose sources are in the mountains not far from Santa Fé. This was the river which Pike might have found, had his search been more fortunately directed, though neither he nor any other American was aware of that fact at the time. Nevertheless, he determined to carry out his orders to the letter, and with more courage than discretion pushed southward from his camp at Cañon City to discover an elusive Red river. He passed up that tributary of the Arkansaw which is now called Grape creek, and thus into the Wet Mountain valley. There the party suffered almost incredibly from cold and hunger; some of the men were frozen and crippled for life. But Pike managed to extricate himself and most of his companions from their perilous situation by crossing the Sangre de Cristo range through the Sand Hill pass into the San Luis valley, where he found himself on the Rio Grande del Norte. He descended this river to the Rio Conejos, and there established himself in a stockade—in part at least for the purpose of tarrying while he sent a small party back for those of the men who had been left behind, both at Cañon City and in Wet Mountain valley.
The secret which underlay Pike's ostensible instructions from General Wilkinson, and the mystery which is supposed to have enshrouded his movements on this portion of his second expedition, are fully discussed in my notes, at various points in Pike's narrative or in my Memoir, where the subject obtrudes. Without going into any particulars here, it is to be said simply that Pike may have been ordered to proceed to Santa Fé—or as near that capital of Spanish New Mexico as he could go with the force at his command—without being informed of whatever ulterior designs the general of the army may have entertained.
III. Pike was captured in his stockade, with the few men he had left about him, by Spanish dragoons, under the orders of General Allencaster, then governor of New Mexico. The message he received from his captors was disguised under the form of a polite invitation to visit the governor at Santa Fé. On the 27th of February, 1807, he left his post as a prisoner in the hands of a half-hostile foreign power, accompanied by the remnant of his men. They were treated with great forbearance—nay, with distinguished consideration; nevertheless, Pike was brought to book before the authorities, and required to explain how he had happened to invade Spanish territory with an armed force. Governor Allencaster then ordered him to report to General Salcedo at Chihuahua; he was accordingly escorted by the military down the Rio Grande from Santa Fé to El Paso, and thence by the usual route southward, in what was then New Biscay, to the first named city. From this capital he was conducted, still under guard, through a portion of what is now the State of Durango, around by the Bolson de Mapimi, thence northward throughout Coahuila, and so on to San Antonio. Continuing through Texas, he was finally delivered out of the hands of his Spanish hosts and captors, on crossing the river which in part bounds our present State of Louisiana; and ended his long peregrination at Natchitoches, among his own countrymen.
At this point the author's narrative ends abruptly, so far as any itinerary of his movements is concerned. We are not even told what became of the men who did not accompany him to Natchitoches—those who were left behind when he started from the Rio Conejos, either at that point, or in the Wet Mountain valley, or on the Arkansaw. It had been understood, and was fully expected, that they were all to follow him through Mexico under Spanish escort. It is probable that they did so, and that all were finally restored to the United States. But at the last word we have on the subject from Pike himself, eight persons were still detained in Mexico. (See [p. 855].)
If the reader will now turn to [p. xxxvi], he will find there and on some following pages an analysis of the original edition of Pike's work, together with an exposition of the wholly exceptional editorial difficulty of reproducing such a complicated affair in anything like good book form. The author, like many another gallant soldier, versed in the arts of war, was quite innocent of literary strategy, though capable of heading an impetuous assault upon the parts of speech. He may have acquired an impression, by no means confined to his own profession, that a book is made by putting manuscript in a printing-press and stirring it about with a composing-stick, which, like a magic wand that some kind fairy waves in an enchanted castle, will transfigure the homeliness of the pen into a thing of beauty and a joy forever. Pike seems to have labored under some such delusion in preparing his copious materials for the press, and no one appears either to have advised him in these premises or to have revised the proofs. The result was innumerable errors, both of the writing and of the printing, most of which might have been eliminated with due care.
In the original edition, which has never before been reprinted in full, or in anything like its own make-up, the three separate itineraries above noted followed one another consecutively, with only the interruption of certain meteorological tables. These itineraries made about one-half of the volume in bulk, but perhaps only about one-third of the total ems. They were called "Parts," respectively enumerated I., II., III., and were the only portions of the whole which were printed in large type, as the main "body" of the work. The greater remainder of the author's materials were then thrown into the form of three Appendixes, one for each of the three foregoing Parts, each one being necessarily displaced from its proper connection, and all being set in small type. The contents of these Appendixes were miscellaneous and multifarious, but reducible in the main to two sorts: (1) Formal retraversing of the ground gone over in the itineraries, with reference to geography, ethnology, commerce, military and political topics, and related matters which came under Pike's observation; (2) Letters and other documents upon a variety of subjects, representing what may be regarded as the officialities of Pike's Expeditions.
The determination to edit Pike with the omission of nothing whatever which the work originally contained, and to preserve as far as seemed reasonably possible the shape in which it came from his own hand, involved a problem whose solution was one of no ordinary difficulty. The division of the book into three Parts was perfectly sound, and by all means to be preserved. The main departure from Pike's plan that seemed to be required was simply to bring each Appendix into direct connection with its own Part, and set it in uniform typography, as being of equal value and interest with the itinerary. Having made these transpositions, I found it an easy matter to introduce chapter-heads which should co-ordinate the whole of the contents. Each of the three itineraries could be conveniently divided into three chapters, covering as many stages of the several journeys; and in like manner it was found that the contents of each of the three Appendixes could be naturally grouped under a few heads, thus carrying out the plan of chaptering the whole book. To effect this result required no change whatever in the course of the itineraries, and in the appendicial matters involved only some few unimportant transpositions, mainly for the purpose of rearranging the official correspondence in the chronological sequence of the letters and other documents of which it consisted. But even in this small matter I have been at the pains of pointing out the position which each separate piece occupied in the original edition—perhaps with needless scrupulosity. A glance at the tables of contents of this edition will show how well or ill the remodeling has been done.
The transpositions thus effected, together with the repeatedly broken and sometimes blank pagination of the original, made it obviously impossible to indicate in this edition the former numeration of the pages. Otherwise, in editing Pike's text, I have been guided by the same principles which I applied to my recent redaction of Lewis and Clark. I do not think that any editor may feel free to rewrite his author. It would be an unwarrantable liberty to sacrifice an author's individuality upon the altar of literary style. And especially in the case of an old book—one whose intrinsic merits survive what are "the defects of its qualities," and thus cause it to reappear in a new guise—is it desirable that the reader should feel sure he is offered a genuine text. At the same time, the essentials of genuineness are different from its factitious ear-marks, and may be preserved with fidelity by an editor who, nevertheless, feels free to disregard non-essentials. Pike's is both a rare and a curious book; yet we need not venerate its abounding misprints, or burn the incense of admiration in the face of its frequently solecistic grammar, or even kowtow to its peculiar punctuation. Such things as these are assuredly among the non-essentials of a pure text, always amenable to editorial revision, and always open to the welcome attentions of a friendly printer. But for the rest, as I lately said on a similar occasion, "I have punctiliously preserved the orthography of proper names in all their variance and eccentricity; and wherever I have amplified any statement in the text, or diverted the sense of a passage by a hair's breadth, square brackets indicate the fact."
A few words may be expected in this connection upon the new matter, by the introduction of which the single volume of Pike has been extended to three volumes, thus more than doubling the original text. I have seldom, if ever, studied a work whose author seemed to me in so great need of an interpreter. Pike was not always precise in his statements of fact, and sometimes failed to convey his own meaning with entire lucidity. Much was thus left to be supplied by the imagination of the reader, or to be clarified by the exercise of his critical faculties, whether or no he were sufficiently informed in the premises to follow his author intelligently. In subjecting the text to a scrutiny, perhaps exceptionally close and rigid, I have desired in the first place to inform myself of the exact significance which the author intended his words to have, thus putting myself as nearly as possible in his place, and always, as I trust, in full sympathy with him, however diverse from his views any of my own opinions may have been. Coming to such understanding of the work in hand—one whose accomplishment is now nearly a century old—my duty seemed to be to criticise the subject-matter from the standpoint of to-day, however copious might prove to be the additional information required, or to whatever extent the resulting commentary might be protracted. This part of my work is represented by the notes with which the present edition has been freighted, and which are typographically distinguished from the main text. These notes bespeak their own variety and perhaps comprehensiveness; but of their value or interest it is not for me to express any opinion.
Aside from this main exercise of an editorial function to the best of my ability, I have been induced to add another to the several good memoirs of Pike which we already possessed—notably Whiting's and Greely's. In the preparation of this I have been able to avail myself of much hitherto unpublished documentary material and other sources of information which have not before been utilized for this purpose. Under the circumstances of its present connection this biography could be prepared with little regard to Pike as an explorer, for these volumes cover all such ground; and thus I could dwell for the most part upon other aspects of his life and character, such as those which led up to his conspicuous adventures, and especially those of the War of 1812 which closed with his death a career of military honor and renown.