Pike Never Reached His Peak

Lieutenant Zebulon Pike looked up at the mountain in November of eighteen oh six and made a confident prediction: the summit was probably impossible to reach. No human being, he wrote in his journal, would ever stand on top of it. He was wrong on that count, and he was wrong about almost everything else in the vicinity.

Pike was on a survey expedition through a region that he did not understand was under Spanish jurisdiction. The Louisiana Purchase had a vague western boundary, and Pike either did not know or chose not to acknowledge that the territory around the upper Rio Grande and the mountains to its east was New Spain. He was, by some interpretations, a trespasser on a military mission.

He never reached the summit. His men ran out of food and adequate clothing. They turned back.

The following February, Spanish cavalry arrested Pike and his men somewhere in present-day Colorado. His maps were confiscated. His notes were confiscated. He was escorted under guard to the Spanish colonial capital at Santa Fe, and from there to Chihuahua. He was released eventually, having revealed nothing of military intelligence, or so he maintained.

The mountain was not named for him at the time. His own notes called it Grand Peak. It did not officially carry his name until decades after his expedition. When it did, it was named for a man who declared it unclimbable, never reached it, was on legally questionable ground when he tried, and ended up under arrest.

The first person documented to have summited Pikes Peak was not Pike. It was Edwin James, in eighteen twenty.