Today Zebulon Pike''s name is immortalized at Pikes Peak, the second most visited mountain in the world after Japan''s Mount Fuji. It overlooks the town of Colorado Springs, where historian Jared Orsi teaches. Orsi was inspired to take up this biography not just by geography but also because there has been no modern interpretation of the life of this key explorer in American history. His life sheds considerable life on the early national period and on the American frontier.Born during the Revolution Zebulon, Pike came of age with the nation. Trained as a soldier and stationed at various frontier posts, Pike believed he had struck a bargain with his country: by sacrificing himself physically for the nation, he would be rewarded with the independence to pursue liberty, prosperity, and refinement. He made a name for himself in the early 1800s, when he was chosen to command an expedition to find the source of the Mississippi River and purchase lands from Indians for future army posts. He proved himself as an explorer who could conduct missions into the frontier and penetrate Spanish territory, including Santa Fe, the Rocky Mountains, and Louisiana. Along the way he was suspected of mischievous plots against the Spanish and for a time taken captive. (This particularly calls attention to the loose attachment Americans had to the new nation the further West one went.) Nonetheless, he advanced within the army and served during the War of 1812, dying during an expedition he led against York (now Toronto).Orsi aims to interpret the life of Pike through several lenses. He casts him as a nationalist, whose life reflects the tensions of the young republic. Through his figure, he is able to convey the growing interest of Americans in the West, which Pike popularized in his travel narratives. He also sees Pike in environmental terms, analyzing his physical encounters with frontier landscapes. This biography, which would be the only one in print on Pike, should have a similar readership as Donald Worster''s A River Running West and books on the Lewis and Clark expedition, as well as books on the interaction between Americans and Native peoples on the frontier.
Industry Reviews
"[An] engaging, readable, and insightful biographical history..."--Ohio Valley History
"In bringing the tools of environmental history to bear on themes that have long engaged scholars of the early republic, Orsi gives us a fresh take on Pike's life and the spaces he explored....[Citizen Explorer is] a boundary-crossing model worth emulating."--Western Historical Quarterly
"As Orsi demonstrates in this nifty environmental biography, the true state of Pike and his nation was in flux....Orsi's environmental biography invites further contemplations, large scale and small."--Jon T. Coleman, Environmental History
"This interesting and well-researched book fills the information gap concerning Pike....In Citizen Explorer Jared Orsi, an associate professor of history at Colorado State University, finally presents the complex and almost-quixotic life of Pike....In his impressive collection of primary and secondary sources, Orsi was able to discover the hidden life of a simple soldier who rose to the role of brigadier general."--Journal of American History
"With thorough research and clear prose, Jared Orsi insightfully recovers the dramatic life and violent death of a military hero and western explorer of the early republic. In an unstable age of competing regions, Zebulon Pike pioneered a national style of manhood which flourished in, and gave shape to, the American West."--Alan Taylor, author of The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia, 1772-1832
"Shifting his lens between grand politics and the nitty-gritty of early American life, Jared Orsi gives us a wonderfully real Zebulon Pike, grounded in the material realities that determined personal and social choices in the evolving West. He presents us with Pike as a man of his times, caught by the promises of a nation that couldn't yet deliver on them."--Anne F. Hyde, author of Empires, Nations, and Families, A New History of the American West,
1800-1860
