BRIGADIER-GENERAL ZEBULON MONTGOMERY PIKE
A noble young American soldier and explorer, whose guiding purpose was: Honor, Country, Duty.
Born January 5, 1779, at Lamberton, near Trenton, New
Jersey.
His father was Captain Zebulon Pike, of the Fourth Continental Dragoons, in the War of the Revolution; later major in the Third and the First Regiments of Infantry, U. S. A., and brevet lieutenant-colonel.
The boy Zebulon was brought up as a soldier.
At fifteen he was a cadet in his father's infantry regiment of the United States Third Sub-Legion.
At twenty, or in March, 1799, he was commissioned second lieutenant in the Second Regiment of Infantry, U. S. A.
Commissioned first lieutenant, November, the same year.
Transferred to the First Infantry, of which his father was major, in April, 1802. In this regiment Meriwether Lewis, of the famous Lewis and Clark expedition to the mouth of the Columbia River, was then a captain.
At the age of twenty-six, while Captains Lewis and Clark are exploring through the far northwest of the new Louisiana Territory purchase, he receives orders, July 30, 1805, from General James Wilkinson, Chief of the Army, to ascend the Mississippi River from St. Louis to its source. He is to report upon the country, the Indians and the fur trade of this, the eastern border of Upper Louisiana.
Starts from St. Louis, August 9, 1805, with twenty enlisted men of the regular army, in a keel-boat seventy feet long, provisioned for four months. Suffers many hardships by
