storm, cold and hunger, but returns successful on the last day of April, 1806, after an absence of almost nine months.
In less than two months, or on June 24, 1806, he is directed to ascend the Missouri and Osage Rivers, and restore forty-six Osage Indians, rescued by the Government from the Potawatomi Indians, to their people of the Osage towns in western Missouri. He is to make peace, by order of their American father, between the Osage and the Kansas nations. He is then to continue to the Pawnees of present northern Kansas, and ask them to help him on to make peace with the Comanches in the southwest on the borders of New Mexico. While with the Comanches he is to explore the head-waters of the Arkansas and Red (Canadian) Rivers, but he must avoid trespassing upon the Spanish territory of New Mexico. Spanish territory is supposed to extend south from the Red River, although the Spanish claim that it extends much farther north, even through Kansas.
Again he leaves his family, and embarks, July 15, 1806, with First Lieutenant James B. Wilkinson, First Infantry, the son of General Wilkinson; Civilian Surgeon John H. Robinson, an interpreter, and eighteen enlisted men, in two boats. The majority of the enlisted men had been with him up the Mississippi.
He visits the Osages, who welcome the return of their relatives, and agree to peace with the Kansas. The Pawnees try to stop him, by order of the Spanish, but he defies them. He fails to find the Comanches. His march by horse and foot takes him along the Arkansas River clear to the Rocky Mountains, where he sights the great Pike's Peak (later named for him) of Colorado, and attempts to climb it. Searching for the head of the Red River, that he may follow down to the military posts of the United States frontier, he loses his way completely. In the bitter cold and deep snows of a terrible winter he crosses the front range of the Rockies, and builds a stockade upon a stream of the Upper Rio Grande River in the lower end of the San Luis Valley, southern Colorado.
Here in mid-winter Spanish soldiers from Santa Fé come upon him and inform him that he is in Spanish territory. They
