Zebulon Pike (January 5, 1779 - April 27, 1813)

American explorer and soldier Zebulon Pike was born in Lamberton, New Jersey, on January 5, 1779. His father was an officer in the American army during the American Revolution. Pike entered his father's company as a cadet about 1794 and became a second lieutenant in 1799 and first lieutenant later the same year. On the August 9, 1805, he started with twenty men from St. Louis to explore the headwaters of the Mississippi River. At Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin, he met some Chippewa chiefs and induced them to expel the whiskey traders among them and to make peace with the Sioux. At the Falls of St. Anthony on September 23 he bought a tract nine miles square at the mouth of the St. Croix River for a fort; and at Little Falls, Minnesota, in October he built a stockade where he left seven men. He reached Leech Lake , which he called "the main source of the Mississippi", on the 1st of February 1806; went 30 miles farther to Cass Lake ; and, after working against British influences among the Indians, turned back and went down the Mississippi from Dean Creek to St. Louis, arriving on the April 30, 1806. Later in 1806 he was ordered to restore to their homes 50 Osage Indians, redeemed by the United States government from the Potawatami, and to explore the country. He started on the 15th of July and went north along the Missouri and the Osage into the present state of Kansas and probably to the Republican River in the south of the present Nebraska, where on the 29th of September he held a grand council of the Pawnees. Early in October, turning nearly south, he marched to the Arkansas River he went to the Royal Gorge, having first seen the mountain called in his honor Pike's Peak on the 23rd of November 1806. On February 26, 1807, in the area of present-day Alamosa, Colorado, Pike and a small number of his men were taken prisoners by Spanish authorities, who sent him first to Santa Fe, then to Chihuahua to General Salcedo, and by a roundabout way to the American frontier, where he was released on July 1, 1807. He was military agent in New Orleans in 1809-10, was deputy quartermaster-general in April-July 1812, and was in active service in the War of 1812 as adjutant and inspector-general in the campaign against York, Ontario, Canada, and in the attack on York. On April 27, 1813, Pike was killed by flying rocks and other debris when the retreating British garrison blew up its ammunition without warning as the town's surrender negotiations were going on. The Spanish authorities confiscated Pike's journals and they were not recovered by the United States from Mexico until the 1900s.