in which some of his men were left for the winter, and with the rest pushed on by land along the river to Lower Red Cedar Lake—Sandy lake—Grand rapids and Pokegama falls—mouth of Leech Lake river—up the latter to Leech lake—and thence to Upper Red Cedar (now Cass) lake, at the mouth of Turtle river. This was the furthest point he reached. He considered the Leech Lake drainage-area—which I have called the Pikean source—to be the true origin of the Mississippi, and remained in ignorance of the fact that this river flowed into Cass lake from such lakes as Bemidji and Itasca, though these and others were already known to some of the whites. Returning from Cass to Leech lake, and thence, by a more direct overland route than he had before taken, to the Mississippi in the vicinity of Lower Red Cedar lake, he descended the river to his stockade, picked up the men who had wintered there, and as soon as the ice broke up started in boats for St. Louis, which he reached in safety with all his party in April, 1806.

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.